“My Irish mother used to say to me, ‘You’re a tinker. You make a little mess and move on.’”

I can’t help but think of Fanny Howe, gone at 84, through her mother’s perceptive words. Howe was a tinker, a mess-maker, an itinerant spirit.

Years after her mother’s observation, Howe remained drawn to the word, aware of its multiple meanings (both human and aviary):

Come, tinkers, among droves of acorn trees
Be only one third needful, O
Name the things whereby we hope
Before the story scatters.

Howe once described her friend, the poet Margo Lockwood, as “Catholic, mystical, modest, brilliant, biting and agnostic.” It was a perfect summation of Howe herself.

For Howe, the first and last words of that litany were inextricable, consistent. “I do think that atheism is the great ground for it all⁠,” she said, “that if you haven’t experienced atheism fully, you can’t grasp the shock of believing anything.”

Howe wrote “I’d always been looking for a revelation that would open the whole universe for me and make it all have sense.” She’d “always felt sort of bereft in the world⁠—like, Why be here?” The search had been unfolding on the page for years. She began her 1973 poem “The Angels”:

The lassitude of angels
is one thing
but how the gold got under
their skin I don’t know

She ended her poem with characteristic lines: “what trembling joy / their suffering has brought.”

Three years later, “A Confessional P.” contains jaunty lines:

I am still superstitious and retain deep respect for gods
whose appetite for doom is constant,
they do not like the self
will do a lot to make it small as an elf

It’s a clerically circumspect poem; the narrator is not at Mass to listen to a rather pompous priest:

I’ll go to Mass but not to look at him.
Maybe I would if he were better looking

Instead, as she would write in her 1977 poem “San Francisco,” Howe was drawn to earthy faith:

St. Francis, intelligent, lived
in his natural climate,—
Assisi’s animals no sissy
would dare approach, he hand-fed,
including a wolf’s roar

Her former husband, Carl Senna, “had a Catholic streak in him,” and Howe would go to Mass with his mother “and see that there was the most profound connection between the teachings of the church and the political theory I cared about.” She arrived at the church via Dorothy Day, Simone Weil, Frantz Fanon, and Gustavo Gutiérrez. She converted on June 4, 1982, and in a poem published that year, she affirmed:

But action is prayer
for the poor and/or
ill; just makes equal
stone and jewel.

Howe’s sponsor was the poet Jean Valentine. Valentine was a kindred spirit, including on the page. They were sisters in prosody. Valentine ended her poem “Forces” with the lines “God break me out / of this stiff life I’ve made.” She invoked her poem “Listening” to Howe. The narrator thinks of how, for her “whole life,” she was “swimming listening / beside the daylight world.” Less like a “dolphin beside a boat,” and more like Jonah, “behind that curving smile from the other side,” one who was “kept, not spat out, / kept, for love.”

Howe’s own verse (and even the syntax of her prose) was pithy and sonorous. Some who craft epigrammatic verse can sound hollow, like slamming together tins in hopes that someone will infer meaning from the noise. Howe was a mystic. Humble and omnivorous, she tapped into eternal songs, and then shaped them through her grace.

Valentine once said that “the prayer [of writing] is always that the words might help someone.” After my father died, Howe’s words from “Monastic Life” comforted me:

What if you think of time as a long and everlasting plain,
You can pass across it any which way you turn.
And walk around the pond with your father time and again.

How once said that Frank O’Hara “had a religious urgency, an extreme sense of joy and excitement and wandering. Everything he saw,” she noted, “he saw really well. He was dazzled all the time, by friends, by the day, so everything had a living context for him.” Howe channeled that spirit in her poems, essays, and fiction.

Our flesh will not remain; death will come for all of us. Howe left us with some consolations:

I won’t be able to write from the grave
so let me tell you what I love:
oil, vinegar, salt, lettuce, brown bread, butter,
cheese and wine, a windy day, a fireplace,
the children nearby, poems and songs,
a friend sleeping in my bed—

and the short northern lights.

When her friend Margo Lockwood died, Howe dedicated a poem to her, and included a request for burial. May it now be so:

Please, if you can, make sure there is an ash tree, young and tight and green.

And bring back the smell of turf for the burning. Of her. Of me.