Author Notes: Alison Hicks
In contrast to the one in Alison Hicks's story, these Irish Wolfhounds are probably corporeal.Puritan XXIII contributor Alison Hicks discusses her poem “The Soul Floats at the End of Its Shell.”This poem originated from an experience I had shortly after my father died. He had a heart operation from which he was not able to recover. He died of pneumonia a week after his 91st birthday. He lived in Carmel, California. In the end, I was able to bring him back to his home with hospice and he died peacefully on a bright sunny afternoon (a comparatively rare thing in Carmel). A couple of days later, I took a walk on the town beach with a friend of my father’s who had been helpful and became a friend to me. I was involved in relating some story to her, and while I was talking, a dog came up to us. In my memory, he appears grey and about waist-high, like an Irish Wolfhound, only smaller. Or maybe I am projecting the memory of another dog we used to see on the beach, or the color of the fog coming in, the color of a ghost.The dog coming up to us was in itself not so unusual; the Carmel beach is famously dog-friendly, and you can find plenty of dogs walking and frolicking with their caretakers at pretty much any time. What was a little different this time was that the dog stood quite close to us, even pressed his nose into my leg, the way they do when they want attention. My friend made some remark to this effect, and I absent-mindedly petted him, but was mostly focused on my story. Usually when your dog gets this close to a stranger, you call it back to you, but that didn’t happen. The dog stayed close to us for a while, and then took off. I didn’t see him leave; he just disappeared, vanished. As we were walking home, my friend tentatively broached the subject. “You know, they stick around for a few days,” she said. And in that moment, I became convinced that my father’s spirit had come back for a final visit, in the form of that dog. The way he had pushed his nose into my leg reminded me of the tone in my father’s voice a couple of days before he died, when I was distracted by greeting visitors and trying to eat breakfast and he suddenly decided he wanted breakfast, and demanded my full attention.I might not have been so sure had I not had a similar experience after my mother died. I was seven months pregnant; she had a stroke on an airplane coming east and died in a hospital in Chicago. Afterwards, my father came on to Philadelphia to be with us. For the first few days, my relief at seeing him overcame my grief over her death. Then I was lying in savasana in a prenatal yoga class and had a vision of her standing on the sidewalk up the street from the studio, with a look on her face that I knew from other partings, of both regret and reassurance that I’d be fine. It was as if she had asked to see me one last time and that was as close as she was allowed to get. In the dimmed room, I finally cried. Silently, so no one would hear.So I thought, if that was her visit, maybe this was his. And I knew that if he could choose a way to come back, even for a few minutes, it would be as a dog on the beach in Carmel.In the poem, I used that experience to explore the mystery of the soul, or spirit. The hospice gave me a booklet called “Gone From My Sight” that prepares one for what happens as a person moves toward death. The pamphlet opens with a poem by Henry Van Dyke about watching a ship sailing out of sight: “Gone from my sight, that is all . . . just at the moment when someone at my side says, “There, she is gone!” There are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout: “Here she comes!” Though I didn’t understand it and still don’t, I felt that mystery of disappearance and appearance when my father died, and when that dog came up to us on the beach; I feel it too when a baseball leaves a pitcher’s hand and then suddenly is in a catcher’s glove. You never saw it cross the plate, though you know that somehow it must have.Alison Hicks’s books include poetry collections Kiss and Falling Dreams, a novella, Love: A Story of Images, and an anthology, Prompted. Awards include the 2011Philadelphia City PaperPoetry Prize and fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her work has appeared in Blood Lotus, Caliban, Eclipse, Fifth Wednesday, Gargoyle, The Hollins Critic, The Louisville Review, Pearl, Permafrost, Quiddity, and Whiskey Island, among other journals. She leads community-based writing workshops under the name Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio.
