A Chambered Nautilus

When I introduced this blog eight years ago, I tried to imagine a symbol that would capture the essence of my aspiration for “Circling Around God”. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke had inspired the title; “I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.”  I discovered that an image of the mollusk called the chambered nautilus was perfect: because its shell is an elegant whorl of widening circles within circles; because I could stylize the first initial of my name to resemble the shell and simply because the nautilus’ shell is beautiful. I later learned that the nautilus is a creature that has not changed in over 500 million years. It is often called a “living fossil,” a signifier of the Eternal Other that has existed before humans ever thought of one. When it came time to publish a collection of my essays three years ago, I chose an image of the nautilus for the cover.

Recently, I remembered that, many years ago, I had written a poem about this fabulous animal. I scrabbled through my old notebooks, found it, and realized that I did indeed have a previous history with the chambered nautilus: a poem that I wrote about my father, as he lay dying over thirty years ago.

I offer it here in an abbreviated prose form.

To A Chambered Nautilus           for Dad      Summer 1994

 Whorled, ancient being, when I was young, I found your cast-off shelled shelter one seaside dawn.  I picked you up. For forty years and more you have moved with me from house to house; to safe shelves and tabletops where no wagging tail nor window breeze, no falling book would knock you down.

The day my father came and saw you, he turned to me, “It wasn’t yours to keep. You should have left it on the sand.”    I knew nothing then of preservation, conservation and plunder without reservation.

And so, my chambered beauty, for twenty years and maybe more, you harbored my guilty grief, though always lovingly, and oh, so carefully, I tended you. Now I have carried you here, to a sacred space, to my window on the pond; to be near water once again, to share with me a mostly empty space filled up with God.

One morning, early, the breeze blew in. Billowing gently, a curtain stirred. It knocked you off; you lay shattered on the floor.

Shattered too, I came to you. With all the mindful, careful days, all the years of fear, of tears, I knelt in sorrow beside your broken body. Your outer shell had cracked, bone-white fragments shattered, scattered on the floor.

Chambered nautilus, no longer upright; exposed, unguarded, you revealed within your purpled beauty: colors of the ocean floor and morning sky; your heart.

And so, my father, you lie upon your bed, bone-white and clear. Freed from being so long upright, you speak to me, curled and smooth. I lie beside you, I hold your hand. Together we speak of ocean floor and morning skies; all the purples, greens and blues of this earth you loved so well. At last, you showed your heart.

Let your bone-white body go now. For you are safe at last and the wind will fly you home.