Elegy for Ava
Remember when you were young.
You shone like the sun.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
~David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Richard Wright
A gently curled smile upon her face,
lids parted in soft, spacious gaze, rose petals
strewn across her tiny form and way,
Ava—drifting like fog along the lowest horizon,
skirted by love, the sturdy hands of six sisters—
passed us on the stone lined path. We followed,
encircled her, held onto each other in October
chill, beheld her wrapped in purple on the pyre.
Four friends stepped out from our circle,
lowered four torches to windows, lit her final bed
from four directions, my brother in the east.
In wait, split logs lay beneath the grate. Others
were leaned like gates against her body,
a modesty, a drape for eventual bones.
In adolescence, the voice of wood cracked,
stood up tall, orange, ravaged her edge, crawled
and licked and spit black coals around a swirling
grey green spiral of smoke lifting languorously
from the center of the pyre. Subterranean viscera,
slowly igniting, finally caught up to rhyme
with the metaphor of her life. Smoke dancing now,
child spinning for joy of dizziness, whirling dervish,
palm up, turning, turning to find the still point
of a god inside, still point of a wolf woman’s eye,
wildness vaporized, rising up from the muddy earth
of her, now a roaring chorus of sunny tongues
reaching, singing the huge bonfire she always was,
released to bend cold air. Her final watery mirage
smoothed to clear space, blue sky, invisible stars.
Our black coats begged the sun.
Feet ice blocks, arms around my lover,
my dearest love, whose quaking stilled
in our embrace, his heart a drum
against my ear, I prayed for more life, more heat,
longed to stand closer to Ava, dreamed
of lounging by her: shoes off, feet naked,
as close to the flame as I could bear,
wondering if my animal prayer was sacrilege
or reverence. But then, the invitation came.
“Come,” the woman said, “Come closer. Enjoy
Ava’s warmth.” Our circle tightened inward,
innocent as moths. Her generous heat glowed
across sighing faces, chests and limbs,
surpassed the weak sun behind us, just above
the eastern peaks, foil to the full moon
in the west. I offered Ava my back,
and to the sun, my squinting eyes. Ava won.
Stories went round. Pagans howled. Buddhists
bowed. Mostly, for hours, all stood silent, humbled,
proud of our friend. It’s all love, she had said.
Oh! to witness this wondrous woman burn!
One day would come our turn to watch
the other become light. Soon, a small white dome
appeared near the end of the pyre: her skull,
I presumed, crown too perfect in circumference
to be wood. I thought of all the hands of family—
born, chosen, beloved Scot—who stroked
that lovely head in life, in vigil, offered comfort
as she died. A fire keeper finally laid more logs
to fill that glowing door, a wooden veil,
one of a hundred falling veils. I believe Ava
would not have minded being that naked before us,
as naked as her stories, the one a self-professed
best friend of countless best friends told
in which she walked in childlike innocence
the last months of her life, bare breasted
in her diaper at a campground when a family
pulled up in the next lot, shy and shocked.
“Honey, maybe you should cover up.”
“Huh?” Ava responded, bent over, tidying
the table, uncomprehending. “You know,” the friend
reminded her, tenderly, “others are not as open
as we are.” “Oh, ok,” Ava said, nonchalantly slipping
the fabric over her thin arms, her shining head.
In commemoration of the open air cremation of Grace Ava Swordy, 21 Oct. 2021