The time has arrived to walk to the river,
twos and threes, with our tea candles cupped,
melted onto tiny boats of birch bark.

And beneath the bowed and grieving trees,
kneel at the edge, release our tenuous fires
to the water’s flow, watch our loose rosary
of lights, form a luminous line and sail
around the dawning bend.

I’ve heard the advice about learning to forgive yourself,
good advice, and indispensable as ibuprofen.
I’ve had occasion to forgive myself,
but I’ve not really had to learn.
A privilege of growing up loved. And a mixed blessing:
for when it comes to affection, I expect more
than I deserve.

Mom, you died before I thought to ask
about the clothes you gave me to wear,
and the patches sewn on:
like the comfortable orthodoxy of heaven,
or faith in the labour of unseen angels.

Or like silence—
being the best way to settle arguments.
I picked that up; used it as a sidearm,
carried it for too many years.

Or like the artful swerve in you,
your open yawn, meeting your sister’s gossip.

Or the unexpected fire beneath your serenity.
The way you slowly turned away from the pot,
your back to the stove, looked across the family table,
and the history of patriarchy—and much else—
withered in your gaze.
And though you turned back to stirring the gravy,
it was a flash—now featured in the halls of justice.

I could never find the right word,
for your kind of loneliness, or was that simply the sigh
between your 1000 tasks?

And while you had words for me—
for my ability to out-disappoint your other children,
every time I come to write the words tender,
understanding, there you are.

Thank you, for the security of your kitchen, where
I’ve secretly watched for your own hidden wings.
Thank you for the eternal grip of your smile,
which I’ve never doubted, which has spoiled me,
yet fitted me for the long haul: living
with the unresolved, finding sufficiency
in what’s incomplete, and how not having
everything I want is part of being happy.

Today, in the mortuary of Christianity,
where nations jockey for Jesus, arm themselves with God,
I thank you for your bannerless faith, where I remain
a believer in your kind of Christ—
a small kingdom of goodness and mercy, taking root,
and humming beneath the surfaces of the world.

Aging is an education in semiotics.
Every ache, a symbol, every pain, a sign,
the set, accumulating and advancing
toward some cliff-dive over the horizon.

But life can be lived in a day, says the Saint,
So does it matter when you die?
Here, now, later, all the same?

No, I do not go gentle, I rage, I rave, like Dylan Thomas,
and my culture backs me up, counsels: steady on,
hang in—and so death retains its subterranean edict,
instead of raising its stratospheric question.

But in the closing years of circumstance over will,
and in the fog of a near-forgotten faith, I changed course,
(which was grace, not achievement), and I sought out
that angel of death, wrestled the entire night.

And it was almost comforting, to limp like that;
to confirm the advertised secret of mystics,
that death could be a (contextual) companion.

“Contextual,” because I don’t want to sound morbid,
or selfish in this, as though my death
would not touch those close to me.

That’s the truer sorrow: losing someone
we care for more than ourselves.
The sorrow lucky people live with.

There’s weird-magic about these moments,
when faith merges with imagination,
and revelation dawns. 
It’s like shedding a skin.

There’s a matrix of Love behind all life,
including its shattering; yet how astonishing,
like a gleeful shriek from childhood,
this sudden knowing, against evidence and achievable knowledge,
that Love sustains all.

Still, none of this prevents relapse.
And here I have the image of a cicada casing
after its moulting; how my own shell, with its prisons of fear,
self-interests, and pettiness, is always waiting for my return:
and O, look, how well it fits, as though I’d never left!

But one blithe afternoon, believe me,
language melted away and I sunk
into the genesis of a rich bewilderment:
the denouement of an unfurling leaf,
the comprehension of a lengthening vine.

I found myself pleading with her.
A dark-haired woman, young, twenty-or-so—and how
could anyone so beautiful appear to understand so little?
I know the beauty I’m referring to here is superficial,
but what if she was also intelligent, and what if her intelligence
was warmed by generosity? I acknowledged, this might be hard to bear.

She stood a little to the president’s left, among the vetted backdrop
of frothy exuberance, “ALL SO BEAUTIFUL!” said the president,
interrupting his speech which was about more bans of this
and more freezes of the other, at every pause the young woman clapped
with enthusiasm, joined the throng of approval for ending the liberty
of trans-folk—an abject community now extinct—implied the president.
And she clapped at separating abuelas and madres from their niños.
Clear-eyed and happy with the president’s proof that violence done
in his name is patriotism, she clapped at the pardoning of those “warriors,”
and clapped for the clearing of a small sovereign state to build something
“unbelievably grand,” as though no millennia-old society
with two million people was involved, and at every pause,
my chest hurt, and I begged her
to stop clapping, to shout,
          NO!
to glare at the president,
then weep in front of the camera, pull out of her long dark hair
something that unfolds into a banner and says,
Shame on you Mr. President!
…and still my pleas bounced off the screen.

Didn’t she know that mercy has been barred at the gate,
that the end of civility stood in the room,
that monstrous unravelings were at the door?

Yet, I could not bring myself to condemnation, and in the end
I held no contempt for her and her considerable privilege,
and consoled myself with a quavering hope: yes, she was attractive,
perhaps intelligent, possibly generous,
but she had not yet aged into beauty.