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.

 

 

Wildwood Ecoforest, near Ladysmith, BC, is an 83-acre patch of old-growth Douglas-firs. These original coastal giants now stand among western red-cedar, bigleaf maple, arbutus, and a profusion of dogwood, on the traditional territories of the Coast Salish First Nations. I was a volunteer caretaker of this parcel of woodland, and on my work days I’d always hear woodpeckers. I began trying to identify them by their drumming, and by sight when possible. I only managed a few, so here’s my (divergent) research on the lot.

§

i
To find a Northern Flicker, look under a picnic table, or better, a spreading elm; watch for a yellow shaft of sun, hammering at the ground.

ii
Hairy Woodpeckers are mercenaries gone AWOL. Wary and needy, and like all of us, a little traumatized. Their therapy is taking down rotting utility poles—watch for curative chips of light flying up.

iii
The Downy Woodpecker? A bit of a hipster. Likes Bebop but favours fusion. Jams like Buddy Rich and Ginger Baker but doesn’t mind some downtime with Charlie Pride.

iv
Check out the plumage of Pileated Woodpeckers, wouldn’t they make fine pirates?  Of course that’d make them qualified for Parliament.

v
Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers are champions of misdirection; they’ve been documented drilling into the brains of over 1,000 species of lobbyists.

vi
Lewis’s Woodpeckers love a Pride Parade: splendiferous with green back, pink body, silver collar, and a red face patch, ready to mock any orange-faced insult.

vii
The Red-naped Sapsucker has a taste for sugar, likes life in the Bay Area; remembers you as a flower child and later in that disreputable bar dancing a credible Bump and Hustle.

viii
Williamson’s Sapsuckers are endangered. They are losing their veteran larch habitat to chainsaws, ironically, through ‘conservative’ policies.

ix
American Three-toed Woodpecker is a stand-up with a quick tongue, able to speak the monosyllabic sap of a Dictator Tot and his sycophantic senators.

x
Red-breasted Sapsuckers are allies of trans-hummingbirds. Their call is a pleasing “mew,” or a harsh, slurred “whee-ur”—they do no harm, they take no shit.

xi
You’ll find the Black-backed Woodpecker among the embers of extravagant burns. Praise this dearest rehabilitator of our blackened valleys and fire-scarred hills.

xii
White-headed Woodpeckers appear to be tiny Cistercians. They are lovers of all they survey: squirrel middens, sap wells, sugar-pine mountains—even you and me, failing their old-growth ponderosa home.

 

§

 

 

    is not a new insight.
Still, don’t we hold on like granite to visions of the perfect,
the prospect of our celebrated fulfillment, our plans for pleasure,
our precise house, set like a gem in a princely neighbourhood,
with neighbours to match, and a carousel of days
with just the right amount of thrill and tranquility,
in a city, in a country, ruled by fairness and mercy?
But when the root of that fantastic flower hits the shale of reality,
the ideal dies quickly, petal upon petal.
So let’s give up on our Eden (which was an apparition),
and accept the wilderness of the world outside our door.
It’s the wilderness of the real we must work with, or,
be forever drowning in waves of disappointment,
consumed by rivers of bitterness.
Let’s brace ourselves with the bones of resolve,
scaffold ourselves with scraps of hope.
Do little things: walk into a crowd of trees,
grandly vent to those trusted ears;
collect a few rocks and build a fountain, make an icon
to drive the mind’s cynical swine over the cliff,
then cast a loving little spell on our trampled bouquet, and say,
I choose gratitude over hatred,
       honest, abridged anger over venom and violence.
Pray too (no harm in it), pray to the universal Unnameable,
to help withstand the death of our dreams,
the rigor mortis of our faith, and wait, — O stabilitas —
like one of the Theresas, or the desert mothers.
Such waiting is like loving, like trusting.
It’s risky, it’s bloody foolhardy — unscientific? certainly,
to believe, to trust, that what’s being built within,
and beyond, will be better than what would have been.
And so, my lovely friend, may I be bold to say,
nothing is what it seems, really means:
that the darkness we’re in, is of a kind that helps us see.