Summoning Sweetcompany

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by Eliana Rose Swerdlow

 

Those who read or hear a poem should remember that a good poem has two audiences; it is addressed to the living and the dead at the same time. If a poet dismisses the living he becomes morbid. If he dismisses the dead he ceases to be a prophet.

 –Vernon Watkins 

 

Until I was five years old, my family slept in the upstairs guest bedroom. My father and my sister slept in one double-sized bed, and my mother and I shared the other. Every night, my mother led us in a prayer addressed to the Ángel de la Guarda, the Guardian Angel. A few different versions of this Latin American prayer exist. My mother taught us this one:

Ángel de la Guarda,
dulce compañía,
no me desampares
ni de noche
ni de día.
Con Dios me acuesto,
con Dios me levanto.
Amén.

The above line breaks and enjambment are my own, or better yet, my mother’s. My mother would say one phrase, and then my father, sister, and I would repeat it. We did this every night, and I cannot remember a time before we did so. I knew and echoed this prayer before I developed a robust vocabulary in English or Spanish. I knew this prayer before its individual words had meaning, when the language was only music.

Whenever I was scared and couldn’t fall asleep, my mother would tell me to recite the Ángel de la Guarda prayer even though I didn’t understand its specific words, and I only heard its music. My mother trusted that I understood the context she relayed to me. “It’s about angels,” she said, “Our angels are always protecting us.”

While I didn’t know the prayer’s linguistic meaning, its music calmed me. When I obsessed over the house’s cracking noises in the cold, the prayer’s soft “s” sounds in “dulce,” “desampares,” and “acuesto” soothed my anxious mind. And as I heard the repetition of words ending in a schwa sound like “día,” or in an “o” sound like “levanto,” I felt a peaceful, undefined airiness I associated with the angels to whom we were praying. By repeating what my mother was saying, I participated in a controlled, reliable rhythm that made the scary night feel a bit more tame. Ángel de la Guarda wasn’t just a prayer. It was a lullaby. 

*

In an essay on lullabies, Spanish poet Federico García Lorca writes, “Spain uses its very saddest melodies and most melancholy texts to darken the first sleep of her children” and then elaborates, “The European cradle song tries only to put the child to sleep, not, as the Spanish one, to wound his sensibility at the same time.” Like a hammer driving a nail, the Ángel de la Guarda prayer wounded my sensibility more and more each night. Or, like a sculptor with clay, the Ángel de la Guarda prayer formed my sensibility around a wound from the beginning. In either case, this prayer illuminated the presence of absence in my life. Angels originate from loss. The Ángel de la Guarda prayer does as well. 

As I repeated this prayer, I understood the music of language to do the hard work of summoning. The Ángel de la Guarda prayer summons the dead to the living, and it summons the living to the dead. As I heard and repeated my mother’s lullaby, my pre-linguistic, poetic sensibility was defined by both a wound and a desire to summon. I desired to summon the living and the dead to one another through a musical, untranslatable language.

*

Before poetry occurred in language, it lived in the music of my mother’s lullaby. And through this music, I started hearing my own language that, I would eventually realize, didn’t exist anywhere but in my ear. Until I looked over my mother’s shoulder and saw the Ángel de la Guarda prayer written down in her black and white composition notebook for the first time, I didn’t know “Dulce compañía” (sweet company) was two words. I heard one longer word I whispered only to the dead. I heard “Dulcecompañía,” sweetcompany, in my head. All company was sweet. 

*

After we all said “Amén” in that green-walled guest bedroom, we’d say goodnight to our sweetcompany. “Goodnight, Sancho,” we said, “Goodnight, Joey.” Sancho was our beagle-mutt and Joey was our calico cat. In death, Sancho and Joey were separated from us. Yet when we wrapped them in my father’s old sweatshirts and buried them in the background, I imagined each family pet became an angel. They became sweetcompany. Their wings lifted them to the upstairs guest bedroom’s window. Through the glass, they saw and heard us praying. And as I spoke to my sweetcompany summoned by the Ángel de la Guarda prayer, my fear towards being alive softened. “No me desampares,” I asked them. Don’t abandon me “ni de noche / ni de día,” in neither the night nor the day. Always be with me. 

*

Before I knew how to read, I’d sit in the middle of the upstairs study—a small room meant to be a walk-in closet but instead filled with books—and flip through my father’s encyclopedias. I liked how the words looked. I liked how some words repeated like colors do in a painting. I liked to think that I could learn how to use these words, and I could make my own painting or music with different combinations. 

In the study and surrounded by language, I never felt alone or intimidated. I only dreamed of using words like a musician uses notes or a painter uses colors to create something one day. Maybe I could create a new language that, like the Ángel de la Guarda prayer, summoned the sweetcompany in which I believed. I could create a language that both the dead and the living could understand. My art would be a means, not an end, to all that can happen when the dead and the living are reunited.

*

My babysitter Sandy helped me learn how to read and write. After she picked me up from pre-school, and then kindergarten, Sandy would take me to the gingko tree at the center of her college campus and just outside my parents’ offices. She’d give me a fallen gingko leaf and a notepad. “Write what you see,” she said, “Just write what you see.” 

Sandy never made me write plots. She never made me develop characters. She never made me write in complete sentences. She let me put two words together, making words like morningtree and mamabug. In my own language and vision, Sandy wanted me to notice the millions of parallel, non-intersecting veins in a gingko leaf. She wanted me to notice how the dragonfly’s wings were almost translucent, but if you looked closely, you could see its intersecting veins like that of a maple leaf. She wanted me to write down the impermanent moments and nature I experienced. In one of her own poems, Sandy wrote that she wanted “to live anew in colors that fade as leaves return to the earth.” 

Sandy, too, had faith in loss. She had faith that something beautiful could come of it.    

*

Sandy was twenty-one when she died in a rock-climbing accident in Snake River, Wyoming. She had just graduated college. At first, I didn’t believe my parents when they told me Sandy had died. She had just promised to take me to meet her neighbor’s golden retriever puppies once she came back from her internship in Wyoming.  “She promised,” I told my parents. I refused to believe she wouldn’t come back and take me to see the puppies. My parents left the room, and I asked my sister to turn the TV back on. A few weeks later, I finally realized Sandy was dead when her mother mailed me a thick envelope of all the little poems I had written with Sandy. 

Shortly after Sandy died when I was six years old, my family stopped sleeping in the guest bedroom. My mother trusted I would say the Ángel de la Guarda prayer in my own bedroom. I didn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to add Sandy’s name to the list of sweetcompany. I refused to transform her into an angel through prayer. I refused to transform her into sweetcompany. I refused to accept her death. When I stopped reciting the Ángel de la Guarda prayer, though, I stopped summoning all my guardian angels. Sancho and Joey stayed in their backyard plots. Zayde stayed in the photograph of him playing the harmonica by the chimney. Tía Peggy stayed in the hospice room where she lost her ability to speak and rubbed her hands all day. My faith, my angels, and my language were suspended. 

The older you get, the more sweetcompany you lose.

*

You can’t bear to hear the list of goodnights attached to the prayer you don’t even say anymore get longer. Goodnight, Sancho. Goodnight, Joey. Goodnight, Zayde. Goodnight, Sandy. Goodnight, Tía Peggy. The wound inside you gets bigger and bigger until it becomes you, until you are the wound that swallows yourself. 

Writing the little poems you used to write doesn’t help sew the wound closed. You realize that everything you see or hear is colored by a new sadness. If anything, your little poems just trace the wound’s outline in a new thread. Your writing isn’t an escape from sadness but a magnifier of it. 

You stop writing poems because you don’t think you’ll live to write your own book like the ones you flipped through in the study. Sandy was your reference for life when she took you to catch minnows in the Neshannock Creek or when she took you to the stables to chase or be chased by the angry resident swan. Now, she is your reference for death. You think you’ll also die when you’re twenty-one. You start grieving your own life and the poetry you won’t ever see in a beautifully bound book on the study’s shelves.

*

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

W. S. Merwin

*

I stopped going into the study after Sandy’s death. I felt her absence the most around books. When I flipped through a children’s book, I was only reminded of how she’d draw illustrations for my poems or how I’d draw some for hers. Everything I read, I thought, would’ve been better if she were there to read it with me. And all poems, I wrote, would’ve been better if she were there to share them with. 

*

Elegy 

Who would I show it to

W.S. Merwin

*

Before the summer of eighth grade, I started reading on my own again. And once I started, I couldn’t stop. I was ravenous. While my friends went to the borough pool, I lay on the floor next to the air conditioning vents in my bedroom and read nonfiction. My favorites books were Night by Elie Wiesel and The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank because they met a desire to surround myself with more and more loss. The more loss I absorbed, the less I would feel my own. 

Yet I found hope amidst the loss. I found hope in these writers’ poetic sensibilities, in their use of metaphor and simile. Wiesel, like me, spoke in trees. “We were withered trees,” he wrote, “in the heart of the desert.” Both Wiesel and Frank understood that, sometimes, a metaphor was the only way to tell the truth in the time of darkness. 

A few weeks into my eighth grade English class, my teacher Mrs. Hiers asked my father why I didn’t talk. She could tell that I was thinking about and feeling everything we read, but she felt like I must’ve not liked what she was saying. My father told her I was a sponge. I was absorbing as much as I could before I would speak. Everything changed, though, when Mrs. Hiers introduced me to Walt Whitman. 

*

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my
         loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,

It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you. 

*

As I read Stanza 52 of “Song of Myself,” I realized an aching desire to feel known. I missed Sandy because she knew me. I missed all my guardian angels because they knew me. When I summoned my angels through the musical language of prayer or poetry, I believed that my angels continued to know me, and I continued to know them. They continued to protect me in my life, and I protected their memory in their death. I missed my faith in sweetcompany. Walt Whitman’s poetry carried me back to my faith. 

*

In Stanza 52, Whitman resembled a guardian angel. He resembled sweetcompany. He promised to be just under my “boot-soles” long after dying and being coaxed into the “vapor and the dusk.” I loved Whitman for this promise, and I loved him for loving me. He loved me despite  my “untranslatable” language and despite the wound of loss inside me. Whitman, too, was “untranslatable.” He wasn’t afraid to “sound my barbaric yawp,” a language before language. My own “barbaric yawp” was sweetcompany, morningtree, mamabug. My “barbaric yawp” was the Ángel de la Guarda prayer before I understood its linguistic meaning. Whitman asked me to return to my “barbaric yawp and sound it over the roofs of the world.” He asked me to write again. He wasn’t afraid to surround himself with wounds.

*

Of all the facts about Whitman that Mrs. Hiers shared with me, one remained unforgettable. Whitman was a nurse during the civil war. He saw and tended to wounds every day, and he said his years in hospital service were “the greatest privilege and satisfaction… and, of course, the most profound lesson of my life.” When Mrs. Hiers told me this fact, I imagined Whitman reading poetry or singing lullabies to the living and the dead. I imagined him to have faith in angels and believe in summoning in the darkest of times, in those times you cannot escape loss.

In Stanza 52, Whitman embraces his own death, knowing that the dead and the living will—through his poetry—be summoned to one another. When he writes, “I stop somewhere waiting for you,” is the “somewhere” not his poetry? Is the “somewhere” not the Ángel de la Guarda prayer I say at the “last scud of day”? By refusing to summon Sandy through poetry and prayer, I lost her even more than I knew possible. I didn’t have a “somewhere” to find her.

After reading Stanza 52, I printed out a photo of Whitman, cut out a small square with just his face and his wide-brimmed hat, and slid it into my wallet. Fourteen years later, I still have this photo with me, alongside the memorial card from my abuelito’s funeral. I touch both when I am afraid to write, when I am afraid to pray.

*

This is the first poem I wrote unprompted after reading Walt Whitman in middle school. I wouldn’t consider this a “good” poem in my portfolio now, but it opened the door back into the study.

*

When my harvest comes

heave my wilted body
into the neighbor’s wheat field
using that crimson wheelbarrow
covered with dew.

Watch the foxes
betray their friends
for my bones, and chuckle
when they grimace
at their bitter and wintry taste.

Listen for the bullfrogs’
fatherly prayers,
suggesting the wind
to sweep my silence
into an ownerless field.

Hush the tenacious chickadees’
protest on the wrinkled oak,
and plea tenderly,
as they are tender too.

Help the stubborn turtle
by the lonesome stop sign,
as he is deluded by liberty’s charm.
Then drive far, far away,
across that tired bridge.

And when you return,
having forgotten me
in your affair with the sunset,
I ask one promise of you.

Collect for me,
in your weary wheelbarrow,
the peace and company
of cracked autumn leaves.

When you toss them
before the foxes, bullfrogs, chickadees,
and the turtle,
forgive me,
for I unwisely took refuge
in the crooning willow’s embrace.

*

I had written a poem addressed to the living to take care of the dead. In this case, I was the dead. It was my body being carried in the neighbor’s wheelbarrow. While Sandy wanted “to live anew in colors that fade as leaves return to the earth,” I wanted to die with “the peace and company / of cracked autumn leaves.” I wanted something for which I always longed. I wanted accompaniment. I wanted to be known.

But I realize, now, that company doesn’t come from autumn leaves. Company comes from the act of writing itself. Or it comes from the poetry of others. Lorca, Merwin, and Whitman didn’t know me personally, but their poetry knows the things that make me. It knows the longing and loneliness only it can understand and accompany. It knows the wound that only language can pierce and bandage. It knows the desire for another reader, listener, or angel “somewhere waiting for you.” 

 


Eliana Rose Swerdlow is a poet from New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. She was awarded the Theron Rockwell Field Prize for her manuscript of poems, Daylight Savings. Now at Yale Divinity School and the Institute of Sacred Music, Eliana is pursuing her masters in religion and literature.