Love's Strength

Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; For love is as strong as death, jealousy as cruel as the grave; Its flames are flames of fire, a most vehement flame. (Song of Solomon 8:6, NKJV)

When Death Comes by Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Being the bride is enough for me. The groom is too handsome to pass up. If she could muster such courage to face a dark cottage, should not I, facing an ever glory, live this way too? I want to. I try to. To be all here, all the time, bolted down in this world like a tv in a cheap hotel room. Yet, I cannot always. I am made of windows to the world invisible, one caulked with onion-thin pages and inky seas. It is that world where I twirl my truths on every side, peek beneath the belly of my beliefs. The world of make believe. It's strange, but wonderful.

Virginia Hamilton was like that. One of my first wonders. One of the first times I snuggled up in a dusty library and fell in love. There had been friendships, impartings, bonds of trust and understanding. But her books, her words, went beyond that. Like the Toni's, her long, strong words sifted through my fingers. I stretched my mind to catch even a syllable. I seldom did, but I always caught something. Something crazygood.

On the day Virginia died, twenty something years after our affair in the children's room, I awoke in pain, my mind ajar. I'd forgotten her. Let her behind, abandoned her. And for what? Books by grown ups who'd made up their minds about everything in order to say nothing. She was gone from me. Flown away. But only in part, for love is as strong as death. And the gift she left me, the best one, was a love, a giddy joy for books, a heart-stopping longing for libraries, a heart ever longing for the children's room.

I went to the library today, squatted down, forgot I was wearing a dress. Probably blinded some poor bloke behind me. I forget myself around so many books.

I always have.

It started long ago, back in a dusty corner of a library in Dayton, Ohio. It was the west side library, the black one, and I didn't go there often. I liked the smell of it though, like incense and rain. It was big and rumbling, smaller than the one downtown, but bigger too, you know? There was wood and not the flimsy kind of today, but glossy, sturdy, stood in the wind wood. My eyes tired from Roots and my head leaking Judy Blume (I'd just finished re-reading them all the day before), I sat in the corner and spied a curious book with a watercolor cover that seemed to bleed through to my hands.

The writer's name was unfamiliar, but the other books with her name there was the medal, the one that I knew meant something good. Only I didn't know how good. Crazygood. The title both confused and intrigued me. The Planet of Junior Brown. I stayed there in the dark myrrh that was the children's room and flew off somewhere.

"You okay?" It was my mother, sweaty from the gym, weary from her job, but loving me with all she had.

"No." No point lying. I wasn't okay. I never would be again. I'd read Maya by then, for the first time I think. Nikki. Mari. Even Gwendolyn the Great. But somehow this hazy dazy book brought all the music in my head together. The poetry.

And so I read more of it. As much of her I as could get. Zeely, M.C. Higgins, cousins and flying folk. I come back to them as an adult amazed at the depth and complexity. Even now, my poor children cringe when I go into Virginia mode.

"Can you just read Junie B. Jones?" they say, knowing that although Junie makes me ball up and scream in laughter, there are times for other things, other words. Words that paint thoughts, jump worlds, run on clouds. Every person needs a few of those. A Blue Eye, some salt-eaters, a little sula something. Some eyes to see God. Everybody needs it.

Especially me.

And she prepared me for them. Greased my wings.

When Virginia died, I mourned for her. And lately, I've been mourning for her again, wondering why I never went to her, why she never came to me. (Maya just ended up somewhere I was once). She lived in Yellow Springs, from where my own grandmother sprung, and there I was dangling between Springfield and Dayton on a kite, close enough to blow her my best kiss.

Why didn't I try and see her, know her? For one, I never knew she was there. In Ohio? I'd have never believed it. She certainly lived on her own planet, the planet of Junior Brown. Or perched on M.C. Higgins' pole each morning to reach the sun. Maybe she was like Zeely, six-feet-everything and towering over the world. But certainly she wasn't in Yellow Springs, loving a poet and making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for her two kids, dreaming for me in the pauses. It didn't occur to my childish mind. And what would have been the point really, meeting her? I'd never be closer to her in the flesh than I was on the page. Never.

Makes me wonder some about this mess I've made here, which is turning out to be more of a sappy teenage notebook than anything. But maybe that's good. Maybe sometimes you just have to let things be. Let them live. Let them die. I let Virginia die, go from me, but she is always here, in my mind with the others, dancing across the page, scatting around the letters, doing word jazz, book blues.

Maybe one day, when I'm dead yet alive, I can live on in somebody's head too.