Kokura, Japan, in the middle of April,
there are cherry blossoms, like faces,
eddying in alleys, swirling on pavement
and in tight spiral trails behind bicycle tires.

The faces fall sad, their time, too soon.
The wind, greedy, plucks them off branches,
and sails them out over the water.
The Purple river is covered, calmed by blossoms,

You can walk on this river,
your small face held above the current,
until you reach the delta,
and your thin time of standing ends.

Blossoms part, undone by wide water.
Then a day comes when all the faces,
gathered in by moons of tides,
are thrown up by waves that break and slide.

And the sea’s purple rivers run backward,
in the secret fullness of night, carrying thoughts
that roll up roots and are pressed out, pearled
and bright, waiting, and made for the sun.

Which comes in time, stronger than wind,
to all the resurrected faces, not one missed.

I don’t know when the cherry trees were planted.

I have a notion these trees are forgotten for 51 weeks of the year. Then suddenly, they explode onto schedules—and into the Kokura dawn, steeping the air with their delicate perfume. In a few days a garland of white-pink blossoms wraps the castle.

Cherry florescence (sakura) drapes the motes and bejewels the slant rock base of the castle. They sprawl above the worn grass and blue tarps and drunken business parties. They look down upon pink-faced children and parents who point and point.

There is a young woman on a plywood stage in front of dusty rows of chairs. Couples and groups of teenage girls stroll by, a few people sit and listen. She croons American pop tunes—Billy Joel is added to the blooms.

And my camera is at my wrist. Everyone takes pictures. And in case there weren’t enough pixels spent on the efflorescence, the castle gift shop will sell you postcards of cherry-bloom close-ups…along with brown bottles of rice wine, Shogun figurines and plastic samurai swords.

But this effulgence, this cherry tree promiscuity, will not be downgraded. I brought my eyes here, but many pause with their hearts. Especially at the Zen temple down a stone path, a short walk away. And especially the old ones—whose ranks I’m joining. They pause wordless under the sakura, between castle and temple.

He confessed that from that moment, he was interested. He might as well have said that he was smitten, but I knew what he meant. These were delicate matters, better to understate.

Dad was 73 when he told me this story. And as he did, it seemed as though the creases on his forehead smoothed out and his blue eyes deepened to the colour of the lake we were walking beside.

One day dad stopped the horses, or the car, or whatever he was driving, and got to know mom. A cracked and yellow edged picture from their courtship shows mom sitting on the front of a 1930 something Chevrolet. Dad has his arm around her waist and is leaning into her, one foot is raised, resting on the running board. Mom has that shy smile and those bright eyes that dad spoke of; and she seems ready to float up off the fender.

They married after a brief courtship, settled into the vagaries of farm life, and raised a family.

In her quiet and charitable way mom gave herself to her kids; and over the years taught us forbearance and industry.

She is a woman of faith. It was needle pointed, embroidered, stitched in pictures and religious thoughts, and hung up around her home. Most often it was taped to the fridge in hand copied bible verses.

If she was worried, verses would appear on the fridge door. The greater the difficulty, the more bible verses.

They also showed up in the tobacco pouch I thought I had hid well enough. Over the years, as her kids grew up, I’m certain the entire King James Bible passed across the refrigerator door. And all the while, she maintained her forgiving and magnanimous spirit.

This is the part of her faith that floats to the top. And many of us here have experienced the beauty of her heart, faith and spirit.

I saw her beauty in other unexpected ways. Being raised in an evangelical home we were taught a doctrine known as the rapture. In church, it was preached with intensity and it made an impression on young minds. The rapture is the belief that before the great tribulation, as mentioned in the book of Revelations, God will rapture, or take up all true Christians from the earth.

I was nine or ten years old the day it happened. It was Saturday and I had slept in. The morning was fresh and bright. But the house was still. There was no usual muted mid-morning clamour. No squeak in the floor that told me dad was leaning back in his chair. There was no little sister rustling about, no usual rattle in the kitchen.

I went down stairs. I stood at the landing and knew the rapture had happened. The door was wide open, they hadn’t gone through the ceiling, they were sucked through the door. I was left behind. And the amazingly bright day turned dark.

I ran outside in a blur. I turned toward the street… nothing. I ran to the back of the house…my mother was hanging up the wash. Oh no! Mom didn’t make it either!

I stood blinking. The world returned. My sense returned, and I realized that if my mother was still here, nothing happened. She would easily have been the first to be snatched up. The day came back in a blaze; twice as fresh and twice as bright, as a result of my survival.

My mother was a vision, as radiant as an angel, beautiful as she stretched and stood on her toes pinning white sheets to the sky.

Today would be a good day. I would find a wild crocus for her. She liked wild flowers.

Mom taught us an appreciation for growing things. She loved her garden and the fresh things it produced. But I remember her saying how she wished she could grow fruit like they could in Kelowna.

I have a favourite picture of mom. It’s from a vacation that mom and dad took in B.C. In the picture mom is holding on to the stem of a cherry, pulling off the ripe fruit with her teeth. Her other hand is holding down a loaded branch. On her face, an expression of sheer delight. Occasionally she gave herself permission for sheer delight.

Delight is what she has given and still gives to her children. Like the kind of delight my dad experienced when he first spied her through a thin line of poplar trees.

Thank you mom, for your steady grace and secure love. You are numbered among the ones who will inherent the earth.

Today on your 90^th birthday we lift a glass to you…you, to us, remain, always, beautiful.

I like the ribald poems of sloggers and shufflers, their sweeping hands and glint-eyes, the meat still in their teeth as they tell it loud. I like swaggering poems—poems that have a pack of Players rolled up under the short-sleeve of a white t-shirt. I like bawdy, libidinous poems, flowing flowering Song of Solomon poems; I like a full-lipped-Flaubert of a poem. And I like the balanced elegance of a plaited poem; a filigree of Frost. I like the surprise poem—the one that at the end of a perfect day happily pushes you in the pool; and I love the one that steals you away to a slow river with broad grassy banks, and lets you lie there and breathe. Such permission in a poem is like roughed-in plumbing—all you need to do is choose your tub, fill and bathe. I like poems that are unsure of themselves; a teacher will say these are weak and deficient poems, but I like them because they are so much like people. I like a carefully-wrapped poem, and inside something turquoise and without purpose—something you’ve always wanted but would never buy for yourself. I like care-less poems, poems that sleep-in, then leave you notes under your windshield wiper while you’re in church—telling you when and where to meet them. I love a free-verse small epiphany poem—like a friend skipping class that hangs outside of your schoolroom window madly waving her arms and grinning, waiting for you to notice her, and the clear sky behind. I also like the ones that take you seriously, respect your mind and your time—and if not your time, at least your mind. I don’t like freighted teleological poems or big cosmic ontological poems. They are like model rockets—all decals and plastic—that topple over in a minor gust, spark and fizzle and spin in circles on the pavement. I don’t like poems that tousle you, because I hated being tousled, and even hate the word tousle. And I don’t like hail-fellow-well-met cowboy poems, although I’ll admit to smiling through a few. At the same time, I don’t like elevated poems, pointy  poems, God-bless-’em poems, poems that talk too much and don’t listen or look—those kind don’t have ears, which means they can’t have a heart. I don’t care for poems that support a thesis, unless the poem came before the thesis was conceived, in which case it can be brilliant and beautiful. But I do like poems that spitball you, chase you and chide you with their slant rhymes and bumpy meter and screwy trochee—and you sit there and take it because they’re saying something important. But the poem that breaks me open, the one that hurts without doing me harm, oh, give me this; give me your signet, your sonnet, your elegy or epic, and I’ll climb, kneel, open my hands, eat the host and drink the wine; trust me, I’d wait through any black night with you.

We’re having a condo Christmas this year, son Justin is home from the misty coast; Daughter Teryl (who just finished her bachelor of science) and entrepreneurial Jordan, Musical son Mark and Blackbird Amanda will be ’round about; Deb, my wife, (who just got a job as staff manager of the Spady Centre) will be around as well:); a few weeks ago we spent a fine weekend with son Lucas and Jamie and granddaughter Madison (“motored to Saskatoon” as Julia Y. would have so aptly wrote it up in Local Happenings in the Yorkton Enterprise); as for eldest son Michael, we’ll be Skyping him in from Japan. (Awhile back we "Skyped" in a hockey game with him—the hockey game, that Olympic one—not long ago we Skyed an entire game of Monopoly with Justin, just a matter of getting the camera angles right. But he took too much pleasure in the win…so we’re wondering about the camera angles.)

But on this Christmas eve, dear reader, I’m finding that the older I get the more I want to plant myself in earth and family and friends. I’m pining for dirt in my ears and creased smiles over mashed potatoes and thinking that the closer I get to the microbial mass of humus and the hug of a sister or brother or mother the nearer I sidle to something eternal.

And the closer I get to that still point, the more I know I rely on ties. The immediate ones like Christmas with kids, New Year’s with friends. And the looser ones of memory—memories of you, to the memories of jokes my late Dad used to tell down at the Springside Sask. lumberyard like: Fellow comes in, says to the lumberyard guy, "I need some four-by-twos." "You mean two-by-fours?" The man says, "Ah, let me check," and goes back to the pick-up truck, his buddies roll down the window and they confer a while. He returns and says, "Yeah, I meant two-by-fours." Alright. How long do you need them?" The man thinks for a bit and says, "I’d better go check." After conferring again, he returns and says, "A long time. We’re gonna build a house." And that would crack ‘em all up.

These ties of matter and memory do matter. So thank you dear friends. And thank you to anyone and everyone who reads and/or responds. Know that my embracing thoughts are on their way and even now are arriving under your doors and settling upon your Christmas trees.

And on this eve of yet-another-Christmas for we ripe ones, and on this eve of a still-new Christmas for you suppler ones, have a wonderful Christmas.

After all, and for us all, ripe or supple, Christmas still signals the Incarnational mystery of "God with us"; the beauty and fragility of earth and family; the hope and sign of friendship and everlasting peace; and the wonder of resurrection, through the birth of baby.

May you all, dear friends and family, celebrate well and celebrate hearty, and have many fishes and loaves left over.

That was the season of lice and scabies and gallon jugs of Benzo-benzoate. And it was the season of a large landlord standing on my feet outside a pub on Government St. telling me I had a week to get him the rent or he’d "do something worse." He was a junkie and unpredictable.

Winter had moved in and it was rainy and I was broke, as we all were, and so it was back, once again, to Port Alberni for a few (Mac and Blo) lumber-mill pay cheques.

The months and years of no-fixed-address had been piling up and all around I sensed things were winding down, preparing to break up. Like there was a ledge somewhere down river and you could hear the water whitening as it fell over rock shelves but you couldn’t tell how far down, or on which bend you should start to back paddle.

It was a year or so after we were kicked off Hornby Island—banned for a year for building a raft out of driftwood, setting it on fire and swimming it out into bay then swimming back and watching the beauty of the thing burn into the horizon. A flaming eye in the night, fixed back on us, pinning us to the beach.

Well, we had taken too much for granted. Like we were the only ones living on the Island. The first or last tribe. And I had fallen for it all. The beach, the salt, the oysters cracking open in a fire and eaten off the shell, the arbutus trees—their skin as sensual as the legs of Tina Turner—the turn of the tide like a seeking heart, the small store with the screen door a short hike away, the communal come-and-go.

That time was too spiritual to last anyway. It was too basic. Too Huck-Finn-human. I mean we built a driftwood hut, called it a house, and why not, it had two rooms and a big open door you hardly had to duck under to get in.

For a while there was a nudist family—a couple with two daughters—that camped on the beach just the other side of a rivulet that ran throughout the summer; and Joe, who wasn’t paired up, was always going over to the rill playing with the running water, then finally making excuses to go over and visit. One evening he just stripped naked and went and joined them by their fire—sat there on a log grinning. From where we were, we could see his teeth shinning in the orange-yellow light.

The morning after the raft-fire, police came and tore down our house and escorted us off the island. Ferries from Hornby to Denman Island and on to Buckley Bay, they saw us all the way to the main island.

Nobody said it but it seemed to mark the end of a beginning. Still we hiked, walked and rode, and landed on Salt Spring, flirted with other gulf islands; always finding ourselves in Victoria and then in Port Alberni when things got too bare-bone.

But the frays came, edges showed and life slowly became serious. People left, moved, found paths that lead far away. There was a time on Hornby that I thought it possible to live out a life entirely untethered—but for that sustaining bay. Silly. And yet here, writing this in the innocence of pre-dawn, I think; and why not?

Winter waits. The soil of summer-fallow waits, bulbs wait, bamboo is excellent at waiting, geese wait until the time is right. Beavers don’t abide waiting, but orb weavers don’t seem to mind. They spin and wait as long as it takes. The earth spins too, waiting its equinox.

But light bulbs, street lights, clocks, little chips in computers, never wait and will never care to wait. And we use them and anything else we can think of to train the waiting out of our lives.

The world of commerce is bent on bringing patience to an end. Industry and commerce keep company with the future. Corporations race each other to see how far they can project themselves into the future, or how much of it they can drag into the present, which destroys both.

There is madness here that we’ve normalized. Because life, our second womb, is about waiting. Waiting, not like Estrogon and Vladimir, but waiting without excessive effort in acceptance of a serial now. Impatience has nothing to do with waiting.

Advent is the season of expectation. It’s a storied rendezvous with a knowing midwife. A time for rekindled waiting—should we see to turn this to our soul’s advancement. 

And in Advent, we wait in a commemorative way, for the birth of Jesus. As people of the paschal mystery we are always anticipating some kind of birth and some kind of resurrection. And so we wait as one waits for dawn.

I can’t see it yet but soon east will grow orange. Behind the berm of buildings across the North Saskatchewan high on the bank, the trees will turn skeletal as light strengthens behind them.

It’s early November and the windows are showing streaks of cold.

Through the smudged glass is the night’s outline of a spruce tree, and beyond, a blackout of tangled bush.

In two hours the dawn will arrive to remove a cuticle moon and some scattered stars.

I sit bundled in layers of clothes, in front of an electric heater, on an old couch, and pray that I never take this beauty for granted; pray that the beauty I see will find a home within, toward which I will rise and repeatedly respond.

For my gratitude is the ragged kind, my words, forgetful. But this—until there’s a newer day—is still what I bring to offer the penetrating silence.

And as the closing season creeps in and I increasingly feel like an Arctic aven; I pray that while I breath I would yet bloom—under the snow if need be.