Short Poem for Ginny — A Friend, who Died on New Year’s Day

There are those in our lives who know
more about us than we know of them.

The quiet ones, the still ones, the listening ones.
Those whose concerns lie always beyond their own ego.

Those who have no rigging for deception,
no contingencies for evasion,
no preconditions,
no camo coat.

Such an unselfed life
is not the fashion these days.

This was not a strategy. And as for those deeper channels —
where words enter caves and lose their edges —
these she preferred to navigate with her beloved,
or through her art.

Perhaps her unassuming path freed her
to appreciate more deeply,
celebrate more keenly,
a weather report,
the temperature of air on skin,
the personality of trees,
the scent of pond-fed cattails,
the sound of a landscape,
the beauty within the splayed order of nature.

Her paintings, like herself,
were delicate registers of modesty and soulful maturity.

Watercolour was her medium:
lucent layers, suggestive of transcendence,
where you can see the soul of a branch
before you see the branch —
leaning over a fence that cuts across a prairie field at dusk
under a moon,
its light drawn close as a blanket.

And now, hands that held the hand of her beloved,
her children, her family, her friends,
the children she taught,
her brushes, her journal,
have loosened, released,
and have escorted us,
complete with blueprint,
into this new decade.