Remembering Mhairi

 

We met as Sparks — Diverging Flints

Sent various — scattered ways —

We parted as the Central Flint

Were cloven with an Adze —

Subsisting on the Light We bore

Before We felt the Dark —

A Flint unto this Day — perhaps —

But for that single Spark.

                                                        (Emily Dickinson, from Wikisource, public domain)

That's a poem for her, my long-ago friend. And now, bells for her...

Long ago, Mhairi gave me Tori Amos's To Venus and Back, and today, a year on from her passing, I listen to "Bells for Her", the live version from that album. There's also a beautiful original studio version of this song on Under the Pink.

As I've mentioned before, Mhairi played the piano (beautifully), and often played Tori's music on it, as well as more classical and experimental work.

One year today she has been gone.

Second poem from long ago, in memoriam Mhairi

By Tracy

Outside the glasshouse

I lose you for a moment and then catch sight:

crouched under twin camellias you approach

with the lens as one might

a timid animal,

allowing them soul.

I hold back: double pink, double red,

such richness best at a distance

or I am swamped

unless it’s instinct

tells me not to intrude

between you and the beauty

of your own response.

Starvation for months

and now this glut of colour

almost insulting in its abundance.

Not all at once

but bud by snub bud they unloose

their vivacity, raised cups

we’d slake our hurts at

if we could only trust

they’d last – longevity

and faithfulness, the books says

so you store an image

to paint them from

like tracing and retracing

a lover’s name.

                     — Tracy Ryan

All these photos were taken by Mhairi in the Cambridge Botanical Gardens, which gave me the central idea for the book Hothouse, from which the poems are themselves taken.

First poem from long ago, in memoriam Mhairi

By Tracy

These poems were not written "in memoriam" but during the course of the friendship, and were published in Hothouse (2002/2006). I never thought to be posting them so long after, and in such circumstances. I just learnt that Mhairi passed away in the UK last month. She was a gifted poet as well as pianist, a film buff, and a savvy winner at all board games.

She was also a fluent speaker and avid reader of French, and a half-dozen of the best French novels I have on my shelf here at Jam Tree Gully were gifts from her, because she loved to give presents.

The first poem takes a line from a beautiful DH Lawrence poem, which ends "in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past".

Piano

Small walls and the furniture

too large, as in a dolls’ house,

or a Dutch interior

the swollen disproportions

of a dream;

a baby grand and you playing

Bach and Satie

as my grandmother played the Polonaises

and my mother the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata

suddenly the hunger

to pick it up again, dropped stitch,

to let fingers go as they know because

it was trained into me

every morning

or because I was born to it

and let it go, wasted and taken for granted

like water; this our idiom

I’ve abstained from

out of some foolish notion

of imperfection, forgetting the pure pleasure

the insidious mastery of song

that makes the child’s heart beat faster

as I stand there

wordless but listening

with my arms around her

in the chill spring.

                                                   —Tracy Ryan