Spires visited Jacobsen often at Broadmead until the poet's death in 2003, and she remembers a large curling willow that the artist kept in a corner of her room. It was bare, leafless and fragile-looking, "but the branches corkscrewed wildly in all directions," Spires says. "They just had this weird energy."
The plant reminded her of a friend who seemed to marvel even more deeply at the things of life, even as time took them away.
Spires always thought the willow would crumble and die, but it never did. "Josephine never tired of looking at it," she says.
jonathan.pitts@baltsun.com
Josephine Jacobsen poems
Distinctions
It is hard to love the pessimist
holding forth from his dank ditch
searching for woes as for Easter eggs
like Proust's butler.
It is hard to love the optimist
putting his jolly mask on grief,
predicting joys which never come
but will be said to have done so.
It is easy to love the feckless one
who takes the days' jerky ride
without the help of theory,
constantly thrown by chance,
surprised by joy, surprised by woe.
A constant wonderer who never
triumphed in foresight --
innocently astonished.
Contents of a Minute
The woman across the hall
is dying. She talks herself into death
with a low rapid jumble.
A rich African voice is talking
over hers. It speaks of green,
as in pastures; still, as in waters.
A high clamor of geese falls
through the dusk, taking a flock south.
Geese are gone. And the woman.
Elsewhere, the wind
blows in from left field.
Obit
The lovely lady posted in red,
No Hunting. Last night
the supreme hunter crossed the meadow,
into the house, to the target. From "Contents of a Minute"
