Aunt Nannie Said Lordy Lordy, A Ghost Story \ Jizo

Nancy: How I loved it when Aunt Nannie (my grandmother’s aunt) visited.  “What have you been doing, child,” she asked as I sat on her bed while she unpacked her suitcase full of salves and tinctures and told stories her own aunts and grandmothers had told her.

Aunt Nannie Said Lordy Lordy, A Ghost Story

Aunt Nannie – her ghost, actually

but not at all

                     ectoplasmic

                     phantasmagoric –

her ghost came in and stood behind me.

                     bosomy

                     camphor scented

                     fresh ironed starched cotton

I was filling a rough brown vase with late flowers

and scarlet leaves and my hand stopped

                    mid-air.

Aunt Nannie, who loved flowers

Aunt Nannie, who loved bright colors

Aunt Nannie, who loved me

                    stood behind me

                    smiling

(I know she was smiling)

                    Lordy Lordy, she said

                    Lordy Lordy, child

I could hear the smile.

Alan:  Some things you never get over.  You may get used to them, but they are always there.

Jizo

         for Nancy

I.

When they took it away from you,

they didn’t.

When they took away the he and she of it,

the unnamed name of it,

the unlived life of it.

When they put you back in your own life

to stagger forward as best you could,

it followed.  On its tiny imagined feet

it followed you, all those decades

to now, to this late August day.

When, once again, staring out at the gravel

and the grass cut short as a shorn sheep and as pale,

you remember – can’t help but remember –

when they took it away from you.

When they didn’t.

II.

In the graveyards of Japan, under the dripping pines,

the stone Jizos stand or sit in meditation along the walls,

the mossy stones, and at the intersections of paths.

These are not the tall monk

with his staff and wish-fulfilling gem

who guides souls lost in the hells

but small things, alike or almost so, with

outsized infant heads and barely suggested hands

raised in prayerful greeting.  Some

wear knitted baby hats or bibs.  

If you took Jizo and placed him,

with reverence and perhaps some tears,

on your garden wall, in a niche

or at the base of a flowering shrub,

or even on your desk or bedside table,

it would not finally go away – it will never

go away – but it would at least

acquire form. This emptiness, at last,

would take form.