NoraSawyer.com

A few weeks back, I asked my husband, Brian, if he had a favorite poem.

“I don’t really know any poetry,” he said. “But you could always illustrate a song.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like that grievous angel one,” he said. “That one’s like a poem.”

Gram Parson’s “Return of the Grievous Angel” has always been one of Brian and my favorites. When we first got together, we listened to Lucinda Williams’ cover version I don’t know how many times, and it’s still in regular rotation on nights when we sit and watch the sunset from the back of our boat.

Researching the lyrics, I discovered that, not only is it like a poem, it is a poem, one that started as a sheet of lyrics written for Parsons by a young poet named Thomas Stanley Brown.

Of course, it’s a song now, and it’s hard to imagine it existing without the melody Parsons wrote to go with it. But here it is, for Brian, on his birthday. Happy birthday, sweetie. I can’t imagine life without you.

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“About ten days ago, I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. I saw light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers, ‘The President,’ was his answer; ‘he was killed by an assassin.’ Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed
by it ever since.”
Recollections of Abraham Lincoln 1847-1865, by Ward Hill Lamon (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1994), pp 116-117.

I’ve taken Monday off work, and now I’m all off kilter. Poem will be posted tomorrow.

There’s something about spring that makes cummings irresistible.

(Apologies for the late upload — last night’s wind storm knocked out our internet just as I was trying to get this out there)

All of these photos are from my morning ferry ride to work.