Like her fellow New Englander Fanny Howe, Frannie Lindsay, in her fourth collection, Our Vanishing, winner of the Benjamin Salter Poetry Award from Red Hen Press, is concerned with faith, aging—and yes, childhood, though her windows into these subjects are less mystical. Or to put it more precisely: for Lindsay, faith is not about seeking a way to get lost. Rather, it is a response to an awareness of the illness and dying that frequently accompany late middle age. In the eight-part opening poem, “To the Muse After a Long Illness,” Lindsay sets the tone for the collection:
2
For then is there not the world
of the heart, the light that is more a darkness
from shining upon so much pitiful evil
and equally hapless good?
And has that light not yearned
for a simple roof to touch,
or the wondrously neutral tip of a ginkgo leaf
just for a minute?
7
Remember how the lankily rejoicing lilies
got louder at first, June after June,
then fainter, until by August
you had to make up words of your own
to sustain them. And then
they grew into the old hymn of stalks,
their flopped leaves like big Sunday frocks gone
out of fashion. Instead of the raucous orange
a stillness whose color only the wind could see.
8
But never, no never, ceased.
Here, the lilies echo those faithful flowers in the Book of Matthew. Though their rejoicing was initially carefree, will must ultimately sustain them, will and hope, as in that perfect single line of Section 8.
Lindsay is concerned with extremity. Our Vanishing re-enacts a deathbed scene in “Unflattering Snapshot with Dear Friend Around a Deathbed”:
Between them, you, getting affably spacey
with imminent nonexistence. Not a soul who loved you
has slept in months and here they all are
crowded around your maniacally sunlit bedside
wearing black T-shirts.
You are holding court with a cult of the guilty.
It is the season for squinting again.
Lindsay excels at alluding to all that remains unsaid but not unfelt. Death, in Our Vanishing, has become familiar, as the opening to “Upon Learning a Friend is Now Terminal and Being Asked for Prayers” attests:
So I send up another of my little gray balloons
asking the breeze or whatever to take it…