Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

On Thursday evening a pleasant woman knocked on my door and gave me a lovely brown cloth bag. It weighed a bit. In it (I did not open the bag) were my Rosemary’s ashes.

Since then, and particularly at night, I can feel her presence. It is both comforting and depressing. I am still at a stage of incredulity where I think that at any moment I will hear her coming up the stairs to bed.

Her ashes will be in residence until the weather gets better and with my (it used to be our) daughter we will drive to Lillooet. Why?

Rosemary was not happy when I finally made one decision (all important ones were always hers) that we had to sell our Athlone corner house and garden and move to a small place. We could not afford to fix leaky bathrooms and mold. The garden was lovely and the living room and dining rooms were beautiful. But upstairs all was chaos. And then my basement darkroom flooded.

We bought our little Kitsilano duplex and we were able to inherit our daughters while both of us were still alive. We managed to have over 40 old roses and many of Rosemary’s perennials. But for her this was not the same.

I rented a truck twice and drove our Gallica roses and plants that could take the extreme temperatures of Lillooet to our daughter’s one acre property. In many ways that garden became the land and garden that Rosemary wanted. She spent many weeks there helping Alexandra to garden.

This is where her ashes will be spread.

More Emily Dickinson

Sublimity mingled

If you were coming in the fall

Purple Haze

Yellow she affords
A sepal, petal and a thorn
Her breast is fit for pearls
I would not paint a picture
November left then clambered up
You cannot make remembrance grow
November
the maple wears a gayer scarf
We turn not older with years, but older
Now I am ready to go

Dilapidation's processes Are organized Decays

I find my feet have further goals

A melancholy of a waning summer
Just as green and as white
It's full as opera
I cannot dance upon my Toes
a door just opened on the street
Amber slips away
Sleep
When August burning low
Pink Small and punctual
A slash of blue
I cannot dance upon my toes
Ah little rose
For hold them, blue to blue

The colour of the grave is green

Its temple stands, alway,

The Woman in white

Her Grace is not all she has

To know if any human eyes were near
Linda Melsted - the music of the violin does not emerge alone
The Charm invests her face
A sepal, a petal and a thorn
The Savior must have been a docile Gentleman
T were blessed to have seen
There is no frigate like a book
I pay in satin cash

Emily Dickinson's White Dress & a Hunter of Lost Souls

El vestido blanco - The White Dress
Water makes many beds
The viola da gamba
But sequence ravelled out of reach
A parasol is the umbrella's daughter
Without the power to die
Lessons on the piny
Ample make this bed
How happy is the little stone

Sleep is supposed to be
The shutting of the eye
I dwell in possibility
when Sappho was a living girl
In a library
A light exists in spring
The lady dare not lift her veil
I took my power in my hand
I find my feet have further goals
I cannot dance upon my toes
The Music of the Violin does not emerge alone
Red Blaze
He touched me, so I live to know
Rear Window- The Entering Takes Away
Said Death to Passion
We Wear the Mask That Grins And Lies
It was not death for I stood alone
The Music in the Violin Does Not Emerge Alone
I tend my flowers for thee
Lavinia Norcross Dickinson
Pray gather me anemone!
Ample make her bed
His caravan of red
Me-come! My dazzled face
Develops pearl and weed
But peers beyond her mesh
Surgeons must be very careful
Water is taught by thirst
I could not prove that years had feet
April played her fiddle
A violin in Baize replaced
I think the longest hour
The spirit lasts
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2014/03/i-left-them-in-ground-emily-dickinson.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2014/01/i-felt-my-life-with-both-my-hands.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/03/currer-bell-emily-dickinson-charlotte.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/03/and-zero-at-bone-with-dirks-of-melody.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/05/charm-invests-her-face.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/06/tell-truth-but-tell-it-slant.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/06/theres-certain-slant-of-light.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/06/then-mashes-it-to-death.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/06/adjusted-to-tomb.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/06/i-could-not-see-to-see.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/06/blonde-assasin-passes-on.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/12/dirk-commemorate-itself.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/12/lawful-as-equilibrium.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/12/there-is-no-frigate-like-book.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/12/light-is-sufficient-to-itself.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2012/11/thanatos-two-tiny-rhododendrons.html

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2012/12/you-almost-bathed-your-tongue.html

Link to: Ashes denote that Fire was

Buenaventura & L.M. Gottschalk

Friday, December 18, 2020

With the death of my Rosemary on December 9, death, my own has been more in my face than ever before. I am in the midst of sifting through thousands of family photographs. My two daughters will have to help in telling me which ones we keep. And then there are all those negatives and slides, too. The awful key word for me these days as I try to pay bills (Rosemary did all that) and see which credit cards I can cut up, is overwhelmed.

But there was one bright spot among all this that while associated with death did make me smile.

My grandmother in Manila had a first cousin called Buenaventura Gálvez Puig. She was a concert pianist with a lovely connection to my mother. When my mother, Filomena was a little girl, Buenaventura would brush her hair. It seemed this was painful and my mother would cry out. Buenaventura would say to her, “To be a lady will always involve pain.”

Through my grandmother somehow we inherited Buenaventura’s complete, leather-bound Beethoven Sonatas and some Mozart. Plus there was a lot of sheet music.

One in particular attracted my eye back in Mexico City in the early 70s. I had a good table saw so I cut wood to make frames which I spray-painted with automobile lacquer. One sheet music cover was of a musician I had never heard of called. L.M. Gottschalk. He was an American pianist (so I found out) who was born in New Orleans. One of his pieces involved multiple pianos all being played at the same time. My baroque bassist friend Curtis Daily told me that in his time (May 8, 1829 – December 18, 1869) he was the most famous pianist from the American continent. He died in Rio as he could never return to the United States. He had had an affair with a student.

The musical piece intrigued me and a few weeks ago I put L.M. Gottschalk, Morte! Into YouTube and found:

Morte! Lamentation

Curtis Daily who also plays the piano says the composition is simple but because it is repetitive it is difficult to memorize. I love it. And, I have one regret. Chances are that my mother never heard Buenaventura play it. By the time my mother became a very good pianist would she have played Morte!. I will never now. And of course there would have been no recordings in her time.

This blog is dedicated to the memory of my mother Filomena de Irureta Goyena and my Rosemary Elizabeth Waterhouse-Hayward Healey.

Link to: Buenaventura & L.M. Gottschalk

My Rosemary & Leibniz/Newton

Thursday, December 17, 2020

It is almost Christmas and this is a picture of our old house. Rosemary loved it and the garden. She never forgave me for having us sell it and moving to Kits. She wanted land. That old house is full of the happy memories we had in it together.

And yet in this little house that our younger granddaughter says is cozy, memories persist. At any moment I think she will come up the stairs from the kitchen. Only once did I dare smell her scent on one of her white nightgowns.

I brushed my teeth tonight. She bought that tube of toothpaste. When will I be able to see something that is not of her?

Sounds do not fade instantly. Scent and smells persist and somehow they lodge in our "scent" memory cells. Is some of her still here?

Since I studied the Leibniz/Newton calculus I know that asymptotes touch that axis at infinity. While there is no indentation of the mass of her little body on her side of the bed I know that something of her remains.

That is comforting.

My Rosemary - the Decider in Chief

Who will be first? She was

Who Will Be First? May 18, 2013

My Rosemary the Hoarder

My Rosemary is no more

Smelling behind the ears

On the same wings, these two can fly

My Rosemary's nine beds

Esa rubia en especial

Deo gratias

Link to: My Rosemary & Leibniz/Newton

If God Were a Woman

Monday, December 14, 2020

My Rosemary spoke French and her Spanish was pretty good. This meant that through our 52 year marriage we did a lot of Spanglish. I would read her poems in Spanish or excerpts from my fave Argentine authors and of course a couple of Uruguayans, Mario Benedetti and Eduardo Galeano.

With her gone, I miss our bedtime banter while I would constantly interrupt her with, “Listen to this..”

There is something wonderful and quite intangible in living with someone who speaks more than one language. That we lived in Mexico for 7 years and often visited my relatives in Argentina or had hot vacations in Mérida or went to Guanajuato and Morelia with Rebecca cemented this multi-cultural bond with a decided direction of the Latin American experience.

An Argentine poet, Juan Gelman wrote a poem that began with the question, “If God were a woman?” Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti wrote his own poem with that wonderful beginning. For me, in all my years with Rosemary, I found she was pretty well infallible in all things. And yes if I am now living a lonely but comfortably free of financial problems life it is because of Rosemary. Wherever I look in our little Kits house I see my Rosemary and how right she was in all that we did. This is why I applaud and love Benedetti’s poem. It is below in Spanish and after in English.