GHOST POEMS FOR THE LIVING: 13 Sonnets by Shakespeare With Distillations and Images

PREFACE

We won’t look at what frightens us. Certain things become invisible. How life evolves and revolves with or without help, what gets carried off, seeds eaten and spit or shit out, flung forward into time, tricked into assisting the cycle and why.

Windblown, sun-scorched, diminished as time leaves, shells remain. Postmortem wonderment at details: veins and channels, husks, pods, burrs, stems. Redemption in a seed drop. Germinating, unfurled again, it is the perpetual cheat. Sift through what veils this world. Layer upon shadowy layer. There, but not there, here and not here, overlap or gap? Years pass and time moves on continuously– with and without us. Certain things remain. The Ghost Poems, like the flowers, are distilled from their elaborate origins, spare, yet holding the roots and seeds of new growth, their substance still sweet. –PMR

Notes on the making of Ghost Poems for the Living

This book is a meditation on time, layers, the veil, the other side. Our fear of passing into it all. How, in this culture, as we grow old, we deny ourselves the complexity, pain and beauty of aging. We look backwards, or try to hold still without having to cross over. We mourn our lost youth. We hide away our elders. I have often been reminded of this through my garden. The plant’s short and simple lives left exhausted forms that confronted me. For years, I have saved and kept the leavings as mementos, as an act of acceptance.

I reflected on these things as I composed the photographs. I read philosophy and theology, I researched and I wrote. Through this activity I encountered the obvious voice, speaking to me across centuries despite his Elizabethan language. I was deeply moved by the constancy and substance of Shakespeare’s contemplations of what it means to have lived one’s life. To grow old; to arrive at the place before the final place, to face one’s past and a diminishing future while continuing to live fully. How could I possibly write anything more compelling than what I found in these sonnets?

The images, the sonnets and the distillations reflect past and present, spent youth and lost beauty, or beauty transfigured and not recognized as such. The layers of our lives, our histories, our connection with people and times past, how fixed death is once it arrives. Or so it seems. What we see with the so-called clarity of vision in the full light of day and what we think we cannot see in the darkness of night becomes a part of our misunderstanding of this side and the other. This is not about religion or God but about our humanity as we all face this certainty called death. And if it’s not sudden or in youth, what it means to age and move towards it.

The photographs are of plants from my garden and the river bluffs nearby. They have dried naturally without benefit of the care one takes with preservation. They have seen full seasons and have taken their final forms from the conditions to which they were exposed. The arrangements were photographed with a large format camera and the negatives layered and exposed to create the sense of a shadowy presence, of glimpsing the other side, of existing in two places at once. The negative aspect of the image conveys an alternate form of existence, of an ethereal, glowing essence, ghostly in appearance and yet containing every detail of the positive. This negative/positive element of the images is counter to the usual associations of the words. I see different connotations and present them as the sympathetic vibrations of resonance, as a place of quiet and deep thought where darkness is a form of light, where light is so bright it can hide.

The “negative” images are accompanied by distillations of the sonnet that precedes it. Each word is located exactly inits place in the poem, yet removed from the richness of the language of its source. We live in a time and place where impatience and the rapidity of thought and ideas are cultural traits, a time of utilitarian, plain language that avoid scomplexity. In striving to understand these sonnets, I performed an act of exegesis that extracted the essence of the poem and concentrated it, to see it plain, but potent. I call these the Ghost Poems, which, like the flowers, are distilled from their elaborate origins; spare yet holding the roots. Shakespeare’s genius is obvious– even stripped bare his words defy time and have the weight of the full verse. Like many artists, I have borrowed from him and in doing so am humbled. “My use under thee taught ignorance aloft to fly, the learned’s given grace of that influence, thy sweet graces, thou art all my art, learning my rude ignorance.”    -PMR 2005

AFTERWORDS

How all stated above is even more so, fifteen years on from the first iteration of Ghost Poems. My aging challenged body, my mind watching itself for clues of impending failure. I am trying to attend to the things written here in what seems like yesterday, with the frightening awareness of fleeting time. How can it be so late already? Yet, I have continued to grow and learn. To love and to lose and still move forward in hope. I find myself in the best of company with like-minded folk who hold me up by simply being fully themselves. In fifteen more years I will be touching my eighth decade, if I’m still on this side. Regardless of what transpires between now and then, this book will hopefully stand as a reminder to its readers that there are centuries behind us and centuries in front of us, with each living being facing mortality, often alone. Yet we must bravely embrace each day until the final moment, then linger a while in the shadows, in the thin spaces where so much life remains in what we leave behind. -PMR 2020