[Tom Sleigh wrote this downright great poem for Mary.]

There is a root word, Mirus, which I have used to title a series of drawings. It comes from the Latin word for wonder. Then there’s a lot that I find horrific. We terrify me as human beings. It is so black and white on some level. Sometimes I see my work as providing me a way to celebrate the world and hide from it at the same time.
—Mary Hambleton

After the reception at Ken and Mary’s, I drove north
in the snow until I got scared with all the cars
sliding off, and so I pulled into a motel. The room,
perfectly anonymous, reminded me, somehow,
of comfort—the comfort we all look for after death:
and all I could think of, staring at the TV screen,
not really staring at it but through it to the blankness
I was feeling, feeling from the snow piling high
out the window, covering the cars, feeling from
snowclouds covering the stars that were anyway
too far and too cold and too surrounded by anti-matter
to know what any human being was feeling, all I could
think of was how strange it was that Mary should be
here inside my head and yet she was dead, this I knew
the same as I knew she was living in her paintings
of the dodo, extinct bird, awkward bird, unlovely
in its flightless, ungainly squatness that Mary
must have loved because it looked somehow
intelligent of all that was going to happen to it
as if it had a kind of second sight: and knew before
it knew that it would be the last of its kind.
And then there was Mary swimming in the pool,
looking up surprised to see me there and me
looking down at the reticulating water talking
to Mary while she talked to me about her surgery
and turned it all into a joke about going extinct,
saying if she had to go the way of the dodo
she could at least paint them and bring them back—
then saying how she loved Teniel’s drawing
of the dodo in Alice in Wonderland who proposes
a race run on a course of each of our making
and so nobody could lose, and nobody could win—
and then I saw her as a scan, her skeleton floating
on the screen, and the snow was still falling,
falling all night long, and what was black
in the darkness was turning white just the same
as if Mary painted it in stripes, painted it over
with what she called my PET, her Positron Emission
Tomograph of her own body that ran away
out into the snow and rolled in the cold
in wonder at the whited out parking lots
and highways and hills and snowclouds
burying the earth so that when she called
it back home, it stood there, her PET, and watched
her, hidden from her, and refused to come.