Still Life with Alzheimers
My meditations last week on gardenly grammar — garden as noun, verb, and adjective — got me thinking about mythical and metaphorical gardens: the garden of Eden, the Garden of Forking Paths, the garden of the mind.
The German Romantic poet Jean Paul famously wrote that “Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven.” But Jean Paul was wrong. Memory is a fickle Eden, a garden full of unexpected exits both divine and demonic.
More than a decade ago, I wrote a three-part poem called “Still Life with Alzheimers” as a way of making sense of what was happening in my mother’s brain — and my own heart — as I watched her short-term memory loss bloom into full-blown dementia. In the later years of her disease, when she could no longer recall what she had eaten for lunch that day, she could still describe the blue flowers painted on her family’s Depression-era china. Those ceramic flowers became part of the stoneflower path that wends its way through the poem, a permanent memorial to the impermanence of memory.
It’s a privilege to share my hitherto unpublished poem with my subscribers in my paywalled garden of love and trust.
At the end of the poem, there is a short sequence of writing prompts for designing your own poetic garden of remembrance. Not a poet? You can adapt those prompts to freewrite about any topic that involves a challenging transition: starting a new research project, negotiating with a stubborn co-author, responding to a negative peer review. The language of metaphor will help you surface unspoken emotions and discover things you didn’t know you know.
Still Life with Alzheimers
in the garden of your mind
the jasmine vine
trails its sweet scent
summer and winter
the hummingbird always
sips from the same cup
and the full moon stares
night after night
at a tideless ocean
that has already tossed you
every seashell
it will ever give up
2. the stoneflower path
zigzags from the bay
to the kauri cottage
in a country far away
where your daughter grouts
a hard green cross
between the brick boxes
of her potager
and lays a wreath
of smashed souvenirs
to mark the border
where clay meets clay
3. at the end of the path
the whitest flowers bloom
from the plates you stored in
the walnut chiffarobe
of your childhood: each blank
expectant face ringed by
a penumbra of hand-
painted blossoms blue as
your forget-me-not eyes
your starry memories
crazing now to silence
and bedded down in stone
in homage to the lost arts
of fire and bone
The Garden of Metaphor
Here’s a sequence of writing prompts that you can use to process your feelings about a person you miss, a transition you’re facing, or any other challenging situation. The “you” addressed in the opening line may be a real person, an imagined character, or even you (a useful rhetorical device for distancing yourself from your own subjectivity).
Start by writing each prompt at the top of a blank notebook page, then keep your pen moving to find out where your words carry you: a poem, a letter, a mind map, a drawing, a prose fragment, a song?
In the garden of your _______ . . .
[What does the garden represent: a person’s mind, heart, brain, body, soul? What grows there, or fails to grow?]
The ________ path . . .
[What kind of path leads into or through the garden? What materials is it made of? What route does it follow?]At the end of the path . . .
[Where does the path take you — or not?]
I’d love to hear what words, ideas, and emotions you discover in your garden of metaphor. Please leave a comment at the bottom of this page, or at least plant a heart.
Kia pai tō koutou rā (have a great day) – and keep on writing!
Helen
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