Elegy for Gemma

I am trying to write about Gemma,

but the words don’t want to let go.

Like the leaves on the Liquidambar maple tree,
winter has done with them
but they cling to the bare, hard branches
still
Waiting for spring to force them off
to make way for something new.

When I think of Gemma, rich images
flood my heart with blood, my pulse rises,
I see her everywhere out of the corner of my eye
Not in shadows but in sunlight.

Meanwhile the intermittent rain keeps everything moist.
Moss grows thick in unlikely places, and yet how can it be
that the February blossoms opened without a sound
When I wasn’t looking, all around me?

What can I do with nearly 13 years of memories?
What can I tell about my first dog who changed my life?

From the first day I saw her, all eyes and ears, leading the puppy charge,
then holding her small and still in my arms on the drive home,
To her “that’ll do” move away from my strokes and kisses
onto the cool tile just out of my reach
Where I watched her begin to find herself.

I can recall running madly along the lake shore
As she swam in a single-minded trance
After the mallard and her ducklings
Ignoring my pleas to return to me.

And I remember rescuing ground squirrels from her grasp
who had made the mistake of thinking they were faster,
Such wildness in her eyes.

This poem threatens to collapse
under the weight of all my memories.
I try to shuffle them, deal them out like a deck of cards
Hoping that those most valuable will be face up —
But knowing I had already held the winning hand.

Now I see Gemma running through the bracken fern and purple grasses
in the Faraway meadow, where joy always waited for her,
year after year, in every season
Scenting deer droppings, rabbit tracks, and other mysteries
Or gliding through the liquid silver of the pond
Her eyes like a bright beam fixed on the blue ball.

I think of how the clock I hear clicking away the long hours since her passing
Used to be set by her demands for breakfast and dinner
Her dark chocolate eyes setting me with a stare
That could stop small armies advancing.

And how she would bark at me if I made her pose for photographs
Front paws lifting off the ground
Eyes softening when I shushed her, ears dropping back,
Her face looking freshly dipped in a snow drift,
dark against light.

How many miles did we walk together? At the sea, along forest paths
Endless loops at Faraway where she would disappear into the woods
Only to rejoin us farther up the trail,
We, thankful that she hadn’t lost us–
While she never doubted it.
What had she found under the canopy of fir, madrone, tanoak and redwood

That we could never know?

So many memories,

like smoothed stones she loved at the water’s edge–

The one I reach down for now

is of her lifting her head one last time

on that last morning

In the dawn glow, looking full into my heart

Telling me she was ready,

That we must do her bidding,

We have no other choice.

And in that suspended moment when she took her last breath,

when her tired golden body began to give up it’s warmth,
When her soul began it’s passage–
I silently cried out for her not to leave me
Even as I knew, from her still open eyes,

that I couldn’t stop her

But that she never would.

So as I sit here trying to write about her,
The words, I know, will never suffice.
They will seem small, and inadequate, and even trite.
All those things that Gemma wasn’t.

She altered the course and quality of my Life
in ways I am still discovering.
Her body defined grace and softness,
Her devotion
Taught me what it meant,
steadfast and majestic as a mountain —
Her love has carved me slow and deep like a glacier.

Gemma has led me to believe in angels, and
I will thank her every day of my life.

-Suzanne Bria

Chardon’s Chantilly Lace ‘n Levity 4/17/97 – 2/15/10

Gemma's last swim, 2 Feb 2010