Katherine Anne Porter Remembered

Maura Eichner

45 / Maura eichner maura eichner, school sisters of notre dame (1915–2009), is the author of several books of poetry, including Bell Sound and Vintage (1966), What We Women Know (1980), and Hope Is a Blind Bard (1989). Her poetry has been published in many journals, including the Yale Review and the Hopkins Review. she was chair of the english department at the college of notre dame of maryland for many years and won thetheodore Hesburgh Award for her Outstanding contribution to catholic Higher education. A native of brooklyn, new york, she received an m.A. from catholic University of America. she met Porter in 1970 and with sister Kathleen feeley and father Joseph Gallagher remained Porter’s dependable spiritual adviser until Porter’s death. source: sister maura eichner, s.s.n.d., “try it On,”Four Quarters 21.1 (1971): 39. try it on you said. And so i did. cleopatra’s moss green emerald with its beaten silver galleries hid the third of my finger bone. i remember spaces of time: Pliny’s gold lion with an eye of emerald; the talisman stone of charlemagne and the rose of carven beryl that some say cortez brought back; how a woman in childbirth knows its poignant healing yet the virgin wears it for Part 6. new york, Washington, dc, and maryland / 217 her purity. O i give it back. Let it beget upon your hand a mystic tree of blessing on whose green veined boughs birds sing eternally. source: maura eichner, s.s.n.d., “visit to Katherine Anne Porter: after the stroke,”America 15 november 1980: 302. visit to Katherine Anne Porter after the stroke When i came into your room, beloved, (pale horse, pale rider tethered to the espaliered geraniums) your left hand pulled me down past the paraphernalia of oxygen tent and mask. you talked of intensities of living, telling me that dying will be part of your answer to the call that life has been. i crouched at the delta of a river i, too, travel though hardly understand. but when you released my hand, to draw from under a blue blanket, your bloated useless writing hand, cradling it as though it were an idiot child, you said—a good creature, and not to be disowned now. i trembled for both of us. Of many gifts i have received, it is that hand, beloved, i hold in the reliquary of a doubter’s heart. ...