Sorting a Life

For the past two weeks, I’ve been going to Sarah-Rachel’s apartment to tackle the job of clearing it out, aided by several blessed friends, some of whom knew her, but others who are just plain helpful people (thank you, Catherine!).

You may think your place is a mess, but most of us at least attempt to organize. S-R was paranoid about theft, and so things were systematically jumbled so that nothing was where a thief would expect to find it. Which meant that every single box and bag had to be sifted to sort out the old bead catalogues, old bills, scraps of paper, paper on which she had written poetry, and little bags of beads. Many pounds of paper and rags are going to be recycled, but in that messy mass I found gold.

After two weeks, I have rescued 163 poems (and several boxes worth of beads and embroidery), which I have just finished typing into a computer file so I can make up a little booklet for her relatives and friends. She put the date and often time of composition on each one, so it was possible to organize them chronologically. The result is an autobiography in poetry. It had been awhile since she had made it to one of our Bardic circles, and I had forgotten how good some of her stuff was.

The poems are surprisingly spare and pithy– an example from 1982 goes–

Star sprinkled sky
I look up:
small mind
clings to
infinite light.

Another, from 1990, when she was living in what she called Sleazeville, Oakland–

I heard
shots again tonight
same as last night.

People feeding
off each other.
“Why do you sew

such beautiful,
wonderful things?” she
asked me. I have

to—I
live ugly.

Some are incredibly painful–

Sciatica
is like walking
barefoot
through a
haystack full of needles,
all over.
(1992)

and some funny ones–

So, God created cats:
Saw what he had done;
Then, He stopped creating—
Since He’d reached purrrrfection.
(1988)

Her whole life is there, expressed and organized as it was nowhere else. This is a gift I hadn’t expected.

DLP