Poem Therapy: Opal - Amy Lowell November 3, 2011 8:09 A.M

Opal
Amy Lowell

You are ice and fire,
The touch of you burns my hands like snow.
You are cold and flame.
You are the crimson of amaryllis,
The silver of moon-touched magnolias.
When I am with you,
My heart is a frozen pond
Gleaming with agitated torches.

Opal was my paternal grandmother's name. In truth, I didn't know her well, and at a very young age, I appropriated my father's anger with her. All I knew is that she took the other children and left him with my grandfather, who in truth, spent the majority of his days, drinking his paycheck on the backstreets of 25th. I knew that my grandmother didn't like my mother very much, that the feeling was mutual, and that she never accepted my older three siblings from my mother's previous marriage.

I knew the wound was deep, both for my father and my beloved grandfather.

Now that I'm older, have two marriages and one divorce, a child and stepchildren, I'm coming to know her in a more subtle light than the harsh black and whites of childhood. I understand why my grandmother, a nonMormon,poor, fatherless, girl married at fifteen to a man fifteen years older, would look to another man, any man, to provide an escape, to a supposed happier, richer life. It didn't happen that way for Opal, my grandmother. Yes, she left my grandfather for the neighbor, and they were happy, for a time. But then he died suddenly, and she was again at the mercy of the gods.

I also know now that my father chose to stay with his father, as a kind of moral judgement. He was twelve, old enough to understand that my grandmother was leaving his father for another man, a "Greek", but not old enough to understand that not every choice has to be judged good or bad. Some are just necessary, regardless of the details.

I also understand now that life broke my grandfather very early: the death of his closest brother, coupled with the death of his eldest brother in WWI, the sudden death of elder sister, being spurned by his fiance, his family's rejection of his new wife and the subsequent divorce, crushed his poet's heart irreparably. Woe on treble woe.

After all this, my grandmother was his last hope at happiness, and he drank it away.

I've been reimagining their lives, off and on, mostly off, for the last few years in my novel, a reimagining of a Greek tragedy. Opal is reimagined as Ruby, Archie as Lawrence. They're minor characters in the novel and yet through reimagining their lives I see just how little we know anyone, including ourselves. We are all blind to our deepest impulses, our deepest selves.

It's this truth, our inability to see,that makes us so fascinating.