Barbara Rockman on “Snowstorm with Lament”

Why now? the poem asks. 

It has always delighted and mystified me how a poet makes associations. Unexpected insights arrive in dream or in viewing a piece of art, reading an article or in conversation with a friend—events, narratives and emotions collide and clarify theme and intention. And so it was with this poem.

I had written about the magpie’s remarkable and insistent wailing over the body of its mate. The poem was simply that, chronicle of avian death and a mate’s ritual to revive, mourn, and honor a beloved’s life.

The poem sat in its snug file, frequently revisited and revised since my residency at Playa in the Great Basin in Oregon several years ago. I researched the bird’s habits and grief rituals. I was in awe of the bird’s wisdom and how it might teach us how to grieve. But it was not until grief became a universal language, an epidemic within a pandemic, that something was awakened. As millions died of COVID 19, as country after country lost its humanity and gun violence became the terrifying norm, as we were locked down, unable to hold each other, as we became lonely and unsettled, I turned to the poem to ask it—What do you want now?

I researched. I tweaked.  I tried to imagine an animal’s bodily, wailing fury.

And still the poem felt incomplete.

A year ago, my daughter abandoned a frenetic film production career in Los Angeles to return to her hometown. She moved into her old neighborhood, our neighborhood. She returned to stars and dog walks in arroyos, to family and mountains and quiet. Her two closest childhood friends were here. In December, one of these young women died suddenly of Sepsis. We have known the family for 30 years through Bat Mitzvahs and weddings, divorces and deaths.

It snowed all week. It snowed as we sat shiva. It was unbearable to watch the mother’s tears stream, to say the Kaddish; unbearable to wonder what if it had been my daughter’s fate.

We were glad for the traditional gathering of love and community, its attempt to console and aid us in reckoning with tragedy. But there was no keening, no wailing, no furious beating of earth or breast.   

What we need, I thought, is the magpie’s example.    

Even as I delighted in deep snow, always a gift in our high desert, high-drought landscape; as I stayed in and watched familiar stucco walls and bare oaks and pines become newly defined by ice and white, I remembered Nicole.  And I remembered the magpie.

Collision, association, the poet’s and the seeker’s openness to synchronicity—snowstorm,  nature’s white shroud, death in its stifling and elegant cape, a young woman’s spunk and future stolen—these wanted to enter the poem. And so, a new stanza, a question Why now?

The memorial service and shiva’s relative stillness and containment, lovely in their tradition, sidestepped a need to crack our armor and shriek.  

Might we, animal and human, be more alike than different in our anguish over loss?    

I took time each day to sob— layer upon layer of a hundred griefs that had accumulated over the past half dozen years, and the immediate grief for a red-headed, feisty, kind young woman, now dead. 

I grieved for one black and white wide-winged creature in whose DNA was instruction how to make a grief wreath, how to wail and shriek at life’s loss.

As a poet, I have learned (not always gracefully) to trust synchronicity, to wait for the missing piece offered as much by intuition as craft—that click of mind and heart that offers necessary complexity or depth of feeling, that instant of fresh awareness (Why now?) that must be snatched before it dissolves.  

Poems, I think, have wisdoms to share, mysteries we cannot control. Grief, in all its shapes and visitations, is like this. Out of waking and sleeping, something washes over us— a word, an incident, a connection with the unknown or subconscious. If we are receptive, if our portals are open, nuance and surprise (and sobs and keening) are offered.

And so, from my life-changing month in Oregon’s Great Basin beside a massive dry lake bed, beside a pond of ducks, in a valley edged with burnt mountainsides, and in a county of barn sides loud with Trump for President to the lonely winters of the pandemic in my New Mexico mountains, a poem threaded through me. Maybe we live one long poem. Maybe we insert ourselves occasionally, pop in, awake, and snag a phrase, a metaphor, a thought, and place it into the puzzle we are living and writing.  However it falls onto the page and gives me the opportunity to shape a poem,  

I am always grateful.