Fingernails

Vanessa Redgrave thought whateverseparates life and deathis tiny as the sliver of a fingernail.She said this not in mourning nor acceptancebut matter-of-factly. The occasionwas the tenth anniversary of her daughter's death.The topic was mortality.

Fingernail. I remembered Hopkins's "Moonrise":I awoke in the midsummer not-to-call night, in the white and the walk of the morning,The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a fingernail held to the candleOr paring of paradisiacal fruit . . .

A mother's thoughts about the loss of her daughterrendezvoused with a poetic fragmentin a kind of moonlit tryst, a meeting halfwaybetween nowhere and everywhere,as the mind is everywhere and nowhere.Grief slides into an ache that spreads and loopsinto the rhythm of our mortal days:fears, regrets, joys, hopes,precarious contingencies;that tiny sliver praise.