(Photo by Joe Mabel; click to enlarge)
With the sudden and untimely passing of Stephen Webb (you can read his obituary here), I find myself thinking back to a poem by Theodore Roethke about another premature death. Oddly, I first came upon it, and was very moved by it, when it appeared in a college admissions test of some kind — the ACT or the SAT, or something of that sort — that I was taking in high school. It had such an impact on me that, many years later, I went out of my way to see the unmarked place on Bainbridge Island, Washington, where, in 1963, Roethke himself suffered a heart attack and drowned. He was just slightly older, at the time of his death, than Stephen Webb would be. There is so much unfulfilled human potential in this life.
Elegy for Jane
(My student, thrown by a horse)
I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.
Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.
If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.
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