Faces blaze white then fade. Angels weep.
A shell has fallen on a graveyard.
A grandmother and grandfather are wandering through ruins
like spectres. The dust will never settle.
Rockets have arrived and have taken out the streets.
All the dogs and cats have left, and the ones that couldn’t
are trapped and yowling in pain and confusion.
When a missile hit the side of a hospital, four girls died,
along with an expectant mother and the would-be father;
also a brother and two cousins, one who was visiting
from a city, 100 kilometers away, and one who had been talking
on the phone to his partner, who is living in Montreal.
A friend, even further away, in Whitehorse, is driving to work
to welcome an international group of environmental scientists,
he too is looking forward to hearing news of the birth.
In a Boeing 787, flying at 40,000 feet, a sister of the once-expectant
mother is reading Ken Follett’s new novel, Armor of Light.
She has planned a surprise visit. In the universal circle above that,
lifeless wails, torrid shrieks, factional curses, are rising,
along with the cries of orphans and the burnt ghosts of infants
and parents and siblings and so on, and the escaping spirits
of trees and animals, and the grief of homes and schools,
and the dying memories of ice cream trucks, playgrounds,
waterparks, and tricycles, and among the inconsolable prayers,
tentatively, Dear God, help us see our children in their children,
and their children in our own.

There’s a rock the size of an armchair high up on Holland Creek. It rests, touching the water, beside a slow bend, down from a granite ledge. It’s a proper hike, usually I take my e-bike. I sit on that rock (the armchair), it’s smooth and I can sit for a long time and look at things, and that’s what I do. (I listen too, and revel as the burble overtakes my tinnitus.) I look at all the things around me. I’m not known as methodical, but here I’m methodical. Stridently so. My eyes pierce, no, touch — touch every crook and beck, gill and cranny, in those stones strewn over layers of gravel. My eyes are like that bird, the American dipper, or water ouzel, searching and finding aquatic larvae everywhere. My eyes bob and dip, God is everywhere. The game, at this point, is searching for a place where God isn’t. I start over, from the top. My eyes search upward through the boughs, past the crowns of cedar and fir right into the blue imaginings of stars; then sweep slowly down the trunks to the understory, the salal, the salmonberry, the fiddle ferns, the moss, lichens, the micro forests, right to the edge of the creek, that speaks in tongues, but like nothing you’ve heard coming out of some Pentecostal church. I give up. God is everywhere. Everywhere the exterior solacing majesty is laid upon me like a feather comforter. But here’s the problem: after 20 minutes or so, I involuntarily begin to look inward, and I think of Wallace Stevens, searching the mystical frontiers for, “the God who must be found in me, or not at all.” But my inner eyes are only half grown, old as I am, and what I see inside are dim outlines, and it’s dark and cloudy like before a heavy rain and my eyes are troubled in that murk. I sit on the rock until I’m tired and I pray: Lord, help me see, make of me, something more. I look, listen — inside, silence, and I see nothing but the flashing of tiny white feathers on the eyelids of a dipper. I cast a glance over the creek, hear its thousand mourning doves, and see a fall leaf, rising in the breeze of the brook. I take it as a yes. Why not? Then I get up, stretch the cramps out of my legs, and leave.

All loves are bodily. I read these words
and they strike within, a deep note of truth.

Something entirely comprehensible, when, as a child
I ran through green willows, heard music,
and knew the world was built for happiness.

And now, too, as one aging into life’s narrowness,
I move through slants of light, from dawn to twilight,
and feel: the closer to death, the more I love this earth.

This earth, where each thing stands for nothing
but its own wondrous and inexplicable existence,
yet is wind-pierced and wave-washed by a Presence.

Like the sand and crushed shells beneath my back.
Like the keening call of an eagle, atop a hemlock.
All animal, all spirit, all holy.

Love Note

– After Walt Whitman

I may appear to you as a “tattered coat upon a stick,”*
my gate, like a comic, tripping over a rake,
my luckless visage, a vacillating army of lumps,
but what is that to me? Should your amusement
be full and friendly, I will celebrate you, and me, and sing,
“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

It is hot August and my birthday is in cool November
but birthdays, for me, come every day, when
I arise before dawn and see the wonder
of my splayed-out partner,
and by my mind’s eye, see the beauty of our grown sons,
their partners, all together, like a choir,
a single breath, a Kyrie, a hymn to greet the sun.

I walk down to the mystical margins of the sea,
where the shore shakes itself like a wet dog,
and there, hardly surprising, is a love note,
written in seaweed, addressed to me,
addressed to you.

*W. B. Yeats

May a recognition of our essential oneness turn the tide away from our current polarization and give us the grace and space for differences and diversity.