I outline his fine nose. I feel the precise bristle of his mustache; note the exact proportion of black hairs to gray, their coil and spring. I look into his eyes, and the blue-gray ring around their brown irises: cholesterol, it turns out, creates that ring. But it is beautiful. I touch his plum-colored, pillowy lips. I see his face as he sleeps. Only I know how his face looks when he is deeply sleeping.
Sometimes in the morning as he finished a dream he would speak in Tigrinya as he began to wake. The boys have seen this when they would come to kiss him in the morning. How we loved when it happened! We’d stay very quiet in hopes the language would continue. He’d soon open his eyes, find us close to his face, and laugh a slurry, sleepy, awakening laugh.
I look for him now in the robust trees and in the custard-yellow magnolia he planted for me that actually bears my name, “Magnolia acuminata Elizabeth.” I look for him in the peonies as big as a baby’s head that he put in the ground for me, look to the small wicker table in the garden where he sat, drank coffee, and read the newspaper. It is fitting that the last photograph we have of him is in his garden. Look at his eyes in that picture, the kindest eyes anyone has ever seen. They still look out from amongst the green vines in his garden, his fagioli and figs. Fichi d’india, prickly pear fruit: I remember when we first saw, and then ate them, in southern Italy at our nephew-in-law Vito’s parents’ home in Ceglie, and we laughed because we called Ficre “Fiki” and now the Italian language rendered him a prickly pear, with the sweetest fruit inside.
Six
Ficre is not here to tell me what kind of trees my parents are, but I know they are mighty trees. They do not yield to the wind; they go straight up, unbending. Redwood seems too regionally imprecise; we are definitely not westerners. I think of my parents as having many colors ranging from the new greens of spring to autumn golds. But they have the constancy of perennials. All shelter and trunk to lean on, my parents stand like trees and survey everything. I am always their child, and yet, it is not as when I was a child, because I am also mother to Solomon and Simon, for whom I must be a tree. Ficre planted trees for me that were lush and romantic: magnolia, Japanese maple, for those were the years of amorous love and its fulsome expressions which sustain us through the winter months of marriage.
Now I need to be, like my parents, the one-hundred-year-old oak in our backyard that lives even after hammocks and tire swings have been nailed in and taken down and after the southern Connecticut tornado of 1989 destroyed wide swaths of Hamden as the wind tore down the streets uprooting trees. Our one-hundred-year-old tree stood, as my parents stand, as they saw elders stand, as ancestors stood.
During the funeral and the months after they come back and forth from Washington. My mother roasts chickens and sets tables and my father gets in the car and buys groceries and non-essential electronic appliances. Never once do they allow their grief to supersede even a corner of our home. And yet, it comes over me like another enormous dark cloud: they have lost a son. They have lost a son. They do not cry in front of me until I am much, much stronger. Then, it is first my father who weeps.
To be a parent is to be terra firma, to stand, is to be planted in the earth.
Ficre was supposed to be an elder, but his days were not long.
Seven
In Lucille Clifton’s poems, the living and the dead speak across the veil. Over the years I have read those poems over and over, especially this one:
The death of fred clifton 11/10/84
Age 49
i seemed to be drawn
to the center of myself
leaving the edges of me
in the hands of my wife
and I saw with the most amazing
clarity
so that I had not eyes but
sight,
and, rising and turning,
through my skin,
there was all around not the
shapes of things
but oh, at last, the things
themselves.
Was that what dying was like, a drawing into essence, a concentrated drop that would then evaporate off the earth? “I seemed to be drawn,” Clifton writes, in the voice of her dead husband; he cannot be sure of what is happening. But the dead husband speaks from solid ground when he states in the poem that he is “leaving the edges of me/in the hands of my wife.” We grasp at the tattered edges and don’t let go. What we clutch is a rent garment. But it is ours, and what is left, now.
The poem yields more as Fred Clifton moves closer to true knowing, as he sees with “the most amazing/clarity.” Death itself is like a snake shedding its skin. Fred Clifton describes “rising and turning/through [his] skin.” A new self reveals itself when the old carapace has shed and died, as though we live in exoskeletons with something truer underneath.
Death comes with a gift in the poem; our loved ones tell us here that what we see with our eyes is different from what we know: “The things/themselves.” “Oh, at last” is the moment of exaltation in the poem. Lamentation and exaltation are simultaneous here.
I am a widow. I am Ficre’s widow, clutching at his edges. I cannot hold on to the garment. I cannot imagine what sight awaits me.
Eight
He who believed in the lottery.
He who did not leave a large carbon footprint.