Lord, lead him beside those still waters,
            those green pastures,
for his dreams glare of florescent halls,
and his thoughts are collections of knives.

An old charge, tedious for You:
if You are all powerful, all merciful,
            whence my sweet son,
who’s suffering is continual?

This is my immodest prayer,
full of accusations,
empty of understanding.

Should I pile on more praises,
change my disposition, shall I kneel in the dark,
shall I prostrate, can I offer a limb, give my life?

My heart is all will, my soul is all brain,
my prayers are connivings and deals going down.
And the more I pray
            …the further away.

You, Lord, who questions through hurricane,
and answers by absence,
arrow me a divine-thought, real as rock
and quick as light, to unwill my heart,
and re-mystify my prayer—to make of it,
            actual prayer.

Here’s what I know:
despair and pain,
like an epi-gene,
can switch on faith,
or just as soon kill it.

So lift me beyond my simmering transactions,
my heaving sea of abject solutions,
into the flickering light of fertile doubt,
            again to stand
on the dark shore of an awe-full faith.

And I will pray to give up this praying.
I will pray to You, to be free of You,
            the You of my making.

Yet this I plead, and will not cease:
            raise and release him,
back to a regular life, like all lives,
with our gales and hard weather, our
            graftings of awe and cuttings of joy.

“Everything has a pulse,” he says.
We’re having coffee, sitting in a small alcove high above
Finlayson Arm, that lurid-blue limb of sea
that narrows toward Gold Stream.

Below us, down a broad path, a recently built lookout tower
is being readied for those who want the encompassing view.

“There are connecting points everywhere,” he says.
I watch his mind at work, he’s traversing the paths
of a lifelong preoccupation. “How would it be if humanity
could rest together, in an open-minded, open-hearted,
          condition of presence?
What if our hearts, our bodies, our selves, were in sync
          with the rhythm of earth, the universe itself?”

It’s a conversation, even at this dizzy elevation, that feels natural
because of his many years of immersion.

Then we talk about the rabbit that breached his garden fence,
his water catchment system, his modifications of a winch
and wagon to haul dead-fall out of his back acres,
          his many lively inventions.

I could listen to him at length,
but always, he asks about me.

Later, he says,
“The thing to do is to have the experience, to see that it’s possible.”
He’s reconfigured a biofeedback device:
four sit in a circle, connected by leads to monitors.
Screens display the independent beats of their hearts.
They fall silent.
          Soon their waves will rhyme.

Many years ago, to further his search,
he built a float tank, the first of its kind on the coast.
(Later spawning float tank centres.)
You step in, close the lid and lie in warm, salt-steeped water.
Your body, fully suspended—freed of all conditioned senses.
In darkness and naked silence, you detach—released
          to a preconscious, circadian calm.

He lives with a poet, herself, a believer in pulse and harmony,
who knows intimately that the heart is a great muscle,
that starves like a winter raven for connection,
and thrives when surrounded by leaf and bloom,
and friends with whom to share
         yam-almond soup.

Yesterday, the sun casually warming the glassed-in veranda,
Rod spoke of their early times together. “Right here,
where we’re sitting, 25-years-ago or so; I was Wendy’s
chosen audience, and she read her poems to me,
          as naturally as breathing,
and O,” the words catch in his throat, “she just killed me.”

Today, mesothelioma, will not release him. Years,
working in oblivious mills,
indiscriminate asbestos
filling his lungs with micron-sized fishhooks.
He fights for life, lives with acceptance.
Puts things in order and hopes for time.

We visit, or call, and talk of the amount of rain,
the whitecaps on Juan de Fuca, the squalls of pain
surrounding his lungs, the potholes of medications,
the sorrow of endings, the joy that’s leaked out
of his model train room, and then, a lighter moment,
a laugh before good-bye. And I
see clearer how I should view my own time.

He lives in a house where the ocean is the horizon,
the forest looms behind, trails he’s cut lead up to a lookout.
And sloping west, there’s a garden, where fruit trees his age
bloom in any weather, and everywhere
          and always, there’s a pulse.

On a sun-splattered path through a stand of birch,
we walked back to his hermitage for tea, but an Indigo
Milk Cap caught his eye and he stopped,
and brought the earth to his knees.
His face drew close to that universal veil, and he touched,
          so lightly,
the stipe and wreath, the cream-smooth cap,
and the indigo gills beneath.

And after a long moment he rose to his feet
and said, “I exhaust myself with seeing,
and all I can do is plead ignorance
          for all that I’ve overlooked.”

So I picked up a birch leaf and studied,
with as much intensity given me, its heart-like body,
its pale-straw colouration, its saw-toothed verge,
the hand-fan of veins, the faint curve
of stem, and all I could utter, was,
          “Looking at something is not easy.”

We had come from the Office of Lauds,
where the Gospel reading was the parable
          of the splinter and log.

So it is,” he said, “when I’m convinced I understand,
          there my thinking ends.
When I cease my certainty, accept my errancy,
          it’s then I begin to see.”

And on that path beneath those trees, I stood;
each falling leaf, a clanging reproach,
every soft and gentle landing,
          a wrenching censure,
exposing my reflexive ranking of others.

And I pleaded, “Why can’t I learn a wide
mercy, love relentlessly, live fearlessly,
          beyond all bias and prejudice?”

“Never mind that,” said Father James. “Go low
to the mushroom, taste the glittering wood moss,
face the ground and listen, to the fall leaves fall,
then follow your desire back to the city,
          a small branching light will lead you.”