"The soft animal of my body...

When I come home this afternoon in the nearly dark, and walk into the kitchen it's perfumed with the scent of  fresh  hyacinths - a gift from a dear friend yesterday...

and a sweet, sharp citrusy smell.....a pot of Seville oranges on the hob, cooling in their cooking liquid...ready for me to make marmalade tomorrow.

My marmalade season has come early this  year....it is also the season of death and funerals in our family...the anniversaries of them.

Tonight I read that my favourite poet, the American, Mary Oliver, died yesterday.

I have quoted her many times on this blog..I once learned by heart her iconic poem

'Wild Geese'...

"You do not have to be good.....you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

And 'Roses, Late Summer..'

.....the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness....

and "The Summer Day"...

"Tell me what is it you plan to do with this one wild and precious life?"

And from When Death Comes...

"like the hungry bear in autumn...

"When it's over, I don't want to wonder 

if I have made of my life something particular and real

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

I don't want to have simply visited this world."

To have left this legacy of words of wonder...I'm so grateful to her...and so sad that there will be no more of her words to reach into my heart....to amaze me.

Because the thing about death for me...I can't yet contemplate how to do anything other than "visit this world"....

is that it just highlights how very physical this life is....and how death destroys that living breathing beauty and mess of it...

and how, at this moment anyway, I don't really care about the legacy that Robin has left the world, although of course it is unique and precious to each of us who knew him....

what I care about is that he can't put his arms around the burden of  my shoulders...he won't ever hold  my nearly always cold hand again...I won't ever see the smile in the tinsel of his eyes......the smile for me....and I can't touch the skin of his face or hear his voice in my ear...or read his handwriting in a note he has left me on the kitchen table.

He is what 'the soft animal of my body loves'.

Where once I felt my life was particular

now I'm visiting it ...

still amazed I am here

without the calling card of 

my husband

to make it real.