melodies unheard

Except for the kitchen, all the rooms in my grandmother's house were painted in shades of willow and celadon. Her bed had four posts, each topped with a finial in the shape of an acorn. At home, I had only a scratchy pink and yellow blanket, but my grandmother's bed was sheathed in a white bedspread with a fringe that almost touched the floor and a medallion made of knots, arranged precisely in the center of the bed. With a few of my grandmother's thin pillows bunched behind me, I would sit against the backboard and listen as my grandmother read me poems.

As a general matter, I disliked being read to. I was impatient with the slowness of the reader's voice, with the occasional stutter or stumble. I knew I could read faster and better and, most importantly, could get to the end quicker. But even then I realized that poetry was somehow different and that nothing would be gained and something would be lost if I ran through the words at my usual breakneck speed.

My grandmother read me the same poems over and over again, most of them from A Child's Garden of Verses or When We Were Very Young. They introduced me to meter and rhythm, and, though I didn't have the vocabulary to call it by that name, to the concept of the unreliable narrator. The little boy who went out before dawn concluded that his shadow must have stayed at home in bed, but I knew what had really happened. Mary Jane's nanny might not have known why her charge was screaming and kicking off her shoes, but I understood that it was all because of the rice pudding.

There was another poem, not read from a book, that my grandmother would recite sometimes, especially when it snowed:

The snow had begun in the gloaming,
And busily all the night
Had been heaping field and highway
With a silence deep and white.

Every pine and fir and hemlock
Wore ermine too dear for an earl,
And the poorest twig on the elm-tree
Was ridged inch deep with pearl

With time and distance, I can see that it's not exactly a good poem. Far from it. But I liked the sound and sway of the words I couldn't quite understand, gloaming and ermine and ridged.

When I was writing this post, I looked up the poem to make sure I got it right and saw, to my surprise, while my grandmother always stopped after the first two verses, in fact, the poem went on and on, for verse after verse. I saw too, that the part that my grandmother never read to me spoke of a small grave with the snow falling on it, softening the sharp edges, blanketing the memories, easing the pain. And I wondered if, like the poem's narrator, my grandmother, when she kissed me as I sat in bed listening, thought of her own long lost babies, "folded close under deepening snow."