Linear Danger Area

The Black Snake

When the black snake
flashed onto the morning road,
and the truck could not swerve---
death, that is how it happens.

Now he lies looped and useless
as an old bicycle tire.
I stop the car
and carry him into the bushes.

He is as cool and gleaming
as a braided whip, he is as beautiful and quiet
as a dead brother.
I leave him under the leaves

and drive on, thinking
about death: its suddenness,
its terrible weight,
its certain coming. Yet under

reason burns a brighter fire, which the bones
have always preferred.
It is the story of endless fortune.
It says to oblivion: not me!

It is the light at the center of every cell.
It is what sent the snake coiling and flowing forward
happily all spring through the green leaves before
he came to the road.

---Mary Oliver, "The Black Snake"

Erosion

"Adults had a drink, they said, to take the edge off, so that's how she came to understand growing up: erosion. She was all edges, on tender hooks, which is what she thought the expression was."

---Beth Ann Fennelly, excerpt from the poem "Waiting for the Heart to Moderate" in Tender Hooks

Sagging jaw-lines, drooping breasts and stomachs and behinds, fuzzy thinking, and enervated tempers---aging is the process whereby the sharpness, tautness, firmness, elasticity, flexibility and endurance of youth give way to softening edges of all sorts.  Ironically, we seek one anaesthetic or another to bring us comfort, to soften us further, to numb us to the sharpness we perceive in our environment.  However, Fennelly is wise enough to know that we lay down new sediment in addition to eroding. Aging isn't entirely a disappearing act.

Honeysuckle Blossoms

"A few days ago you and your mother came home with flowers...You had honeysuckle, and you showed me how to suck the nectar out of the blossoms.  You would bite the little tip off a flower and then hand it to me, and I pretended I didn't know how to go about it, and I would put the whole flower in my mouth, and pretend to chew it and swallow it, or I'd act as if it were a little whistle and try to blow through it, and you'd laugh and laugh and say, ""No! no! no!! And then I pretended I had a bee buzzing around in my mouth, and you said, "No, you don't, there wasn't any bee!"  and I grabbed you around the shoulders and blew into your ear and you jumped up as though you thought maybe there was a bee after all, and you laughed, and then you got serious and you said, "I want you to do this."  And then you put your hand on my cheek and touched the flower to my lips, so gently and carefully, and said, "Now sip."  You said, "You have to take your medicine."  So I did, and it tasted exactly like honeysuckle, just the way it did when I was your age and it seemed to grow on every fence post and porch railing in creation."

--Marilynne Robinson, Gilead  (2004)

I knew that if I searched long and hard enough, that I would locate a quote devoted to explaining how to extract the "honey" from honeysuckle.   I was surprised, however, to locate one that also documents the bittersweetness of advanced parenthood and the recognition of one's own mortality.  In this quote, a man in his seventies whose health is failing is reintroduced to the succulence of honeysuckle by his very young son.  The poignancy of this scene and the intense feeling of longing that it evokes is dependent on the juxtaposition of "medicine" and nectar, spring blossoms and the late of autumn of life.  But it is also clear that the nostalgic practice of honeysuckle sipping--which is both familiar to the speaker and yet also made new through the experience of rediscovering it with his son-- is a secular ritual.    In this simple pleasure, we discern a gesture towards historical continuity.

On Mortality and the Inevitable

True, 'tis an unhappy circumstance of life, that love should ever die before us; and that the man so often should outlive the lover. But say what you will, 'tis better to be left than never to have been loved. To pass our youth in dull indifference, to refuse the sweets of life because they once must leave us, is as preposterous as to wish to have been born old, because we one day must be old. For my part, my youth may wear and waste, but it shall never rust in my possession.

--Congreve, "The Way of the World," Act II, Scene I