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John Chamberlain

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  1. This poem has a number of allusions to poems that my mother loved. I read this at her funeral in Cheshire, CT on January 12, 2008. We were so honored to have many of her former students present. I thank you for your several posts and obituaries about her life. We will miss her. -- John Chamberlain Jr. jcsm@comcast.net For Ernestine Stodelle (Mom), And how to make sense of your life with mine, except to say I shall find you in many places, in a certain towering elm tree, in the faces of your children, and grandchildren, in Vivaldi music, in dances of greeting, in the elastic shapes of morning, in paintings and photographs still but charged with action and story, in any of the seasons, although especially in April and early May and in poems, and those last hiding places of snow, poems that speak of discoveries, such as Keats’ vision of stout Cortez first glimpsing the Pacific, looking in wild surmise with his men, silent upon a peak in Darien. The gasp she had in those moments of revelation, like that predawn moment we witnessed in Cheshire, when so many planets at once brightened the sky, and likewise so many rabbits ran about the lawn. and she saying, “You will remember this.” Yes, I do, and much more, for there were so many bright constellations of people in her life, and my parents’ house was a lively place. She lived for that predawn wonder, for the shiver and silver lining. Tanya said that before she died she was breathing, and then she stopped. I imagine her last breath to be a gasp. Dickinson said, “Love is...the exponent of breath.” She asked for that to be on her gravestone. What do we make of that? That love is multiplied by breath? That a breath opens us to the kindling charge of love? And she was one who believed in action. Her spirit is a silver bow, a crescent moon new bent in heaven. It will gather there its charge and fire back to Earth. I’m sure you can imagine her in your own way. Perhaps you knew that gasp, that sudden intake of breath. I’m sure you knew her animated chatter. She was a star to many a wandering bark. The girls and women in her classes experienced the consuming fullness of living in their bodies, now heavy, now light, falling, then recovering, straining, stretching, strengthening, and sensing a wholeness wrapped up in movement, a sweep of the arm, leaping into space, and always the shuddering return, fall and recover, Apollo and Dionysus, stasis and abandon, light and darkness, bright knowledge, then the river of forgetting, muscle and memory, breath and bliss, surrender and summation, rehearsal and chaos, death and renewal, now and forever. Amen. Who could not long for such wholeness, such release? We shall remember you there. She was a star to many a wandering bark. Her worth was known, her height was taken. And yet, she was time’s fool, aren’t we all, crying in her springs, knowing full well that April is the cruelest month, taking both husbands from her then, and still she endured to be the forced forsythia for my father, to smell the hyacinth’s dazzling beauty, her eyes failing, looking into the heart of light, the silence. She had a favorite tree, did you know? On her many trips along the Merritt Parkway in Fairfield, in the meridian, she proclaimed it hers. You will know it when you see it, It is an elm tree, whole, resplendent, strong, full of symmetry, deep rooted, crowned. You can find her there. I imagine you best in the fullness of your life, such as when I’d come home from college in those first five minutes of seeing you I felt something special in the air, and you would stand up on the blue bench to greet me, your way of crowing about how I’d grown. A joyous greeting always feels like a prize. It wasn’t who you were, then, but what you meant to me. Above all, I can see her preparing for her beloved dance performances, perhaps a dress rehearsal, her dancers quite in command of their moves, their bodies swaying graciously to Vivaldi’s music, her glance brightening from the audience’s side, and then, her gasp -- unable to tell the dancer from the dance. -- John Chamberlain
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