It was early last March, the day after my Aunt Marie’s funeral. My cousin Amy and I were returning to our hotel after spending a few hours clearing out her mom’s apartment at the assisted living facility where she had lived. It’s always a big job, and Amy had set a modest goal for us: “Let’s just see if we can put a dent in it,” she said as we began. I emptied the bookshelf, making separate stacks of family albums, novels, and nature books while Amy packed up the kitchen. Then we both went to the basement to tackle the storage locker. We brought the contents up to the apartment and made poignant piles of Christmas decorations, old board games—a life packaged in plastic tubs. After that we left off for the day. In the car, Amy, who was driving, turned to me and said: “You should continue the poem project.”

Around 2020 I began sending Marie poems once a week, which I printed out from the Poetry Foundation website. It’s a safe site, well organized by topics and themes such as the Seasons, Relationships, Weather, Gardening. This came about because, in the age of the internet and email, Marie and I lamented the loss of old-fashioned letter writing as a way of keeping in touch—the arrival of a stamped and addressed envelope bearing folded pages, something you open and hold in your hands. So, we began writing letters. After we exchanged a few, I called her up and cheerfully mentioned our letter writing project. She was nonplussed. I was confused. “I thought we liked getting letters,” I said. “Well,” Marie said, “you answer my letter right away.” “And that’s no good because . . .?” “Because then right away I owe you one.” I hadn’t thought of that. See, I want to respond quickly so it’s done, because for me owing someone a letter is like owing them money.

It was a good idea but an incompatible approach. Then fate intervened. Anne Conlon, my editor at the Human Life Review, emailed me Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (I had written a blog about COVID that referenced daffodils). Marie was a gardener. I’ll email this to her. No! Wait! I’ll print it out and snail-mail it to her and include a brief note saying there’s no need to write back, just enjoy the poem. She loved the idea. So that’s how it started, and I soon discovered the wonderful Poetry Foundation website (www.poetryfoundation.org). Still, there was a learning curve. I sent her “The Panther” by Rilke, an Austrian writer and poet whose work has undercurrents of mysticism. I called her. “Did you like it?” “No.”

Marie was candid.

It’s not that Rilke was beyond her ken, she was educated and a voracious reader. (Amy told me she once took The Grapes of Wrath out of the library—in large print! It was the size of the family bible!) I think she just didn’t like to think of an animal caged and pacing. But I learned. Flowers and nature, Robert Frost, always welcome; she felt strongly about Native American concerns so anything by them or about them. Every time we spoke on the phone, she would say how much she appreciated it. Then cousin Debbie, another daughter, began recycling them. After a few weeks’ worth of poems piled up she would put them in random mailboxes as an anonymous gift to Marie’s neighbors. Not long after that a poetry group was formed at her residence. Debbie felt certain the recycled poems inspired it.

Now we’re waiting at a red light. “Even though mom is gone you should continue this. It’s really a perfect way of reaching out to people in retirement homes. Maybe get a mailing list from a facility and send poems to random old folks and make their day. It would be a really nice thing to do.” “I’m not nice, Amy.” “Sure you are.” “No, Amy. I’m not.”

It’s true. I’m not bad. I try to be fair. I think I am honest (pending the irrefutable review before Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates). I’m just not the type to volunteer for a soup kitchen or organize a kumbaya sing-along or apply for a grant to pay for the xeroxing and postage to mail poems to strangers state-wide. I told her: “I did this for your mother because I loved her. She was someone I knew all my life.” Amy got quiet. Amy is a nurse. Helping people in general is her calling. I relented. “What I could do, though, is write a blog about it. Maybe others will get the idea to do this for loved ones in retirement homes. It’s always nice to get a letter.” Amy brightened and nodded her head. The light changed. “Yes, it is,” she said, as we drove through.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

—William Wordsworth

The Panther

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

—Rainer Maria Rilke