I have called a friend who says he is sitting on his front step
watching a bald eagle who is watching him, carefully,
from the crown of a Sitka spruce. I tell him it is an omen for good.

He is labouring under a sentence, lodged in the linings of a lung,
                                                   brittle fascicles of worry,
like stiff dry grass thrust through February snow.

I have called the sea-fogged hills and the big-leaf maples
and have asked them why, on this planet shrouded in soft
hallowed light, our souls, like raptors, remain restless,
                                                                          for illumination.

I have seen cities, with grieving houses, where
somewhere, in a seldom-used kitchen, a sixties song
is breaking the heart of an aging woman, somewhere,
in a lonesome bedroom, a boy is trained by a slim screen.
somewhere, a girl in high school is in the back of a police car,
                                                              somewhere, more sirens.

I have called to the rain. I said, “Add my tears to your flask.”
I have called to my parents, and friends, who have passed,
who, like mute doves in distant places,
echo my long silent mourning, and still,
I hear the cantering beauty of their voices.

I turned to God and shouted, “Does being have a meaning?”
and round some parabolic room, came Mystery’s whisper,
“Ask instead, does meaning have a Being?”

And I thought of the risen Christ, and I called
to the Easter moon that rose above the paschal sky,
and in the light of morning, I saw the eagle and the rain
and the boy and the sea-fogged hills and the city of sorrow,
with its cemetery at the limits, and I asked,
“Who are in these graves?” And Christ said,
                                                                  “No one!”

And suddenly I heard, as though above the hem of time, all beings 
of earth, mothers and fathers, companions and partners,
                                              cry out with love.

It’s that time at the close of the afternoon, when you rise
to the evening, go down the spiral stairs to the glass-walled bar
overlooking the swimming pool and order a cerveja,
where a small crowd of vacationers, smelling faintly
of suntan lotion, sit and tell stories, of getting the best deal
on a pair of cork sandals, of standing, mute, at the sight
of Montserrat Monastery, of heart operations, with complications,
of a drill-sergeant yoga instructor, of a mother, cursing her nursing home,
of grandchildren, turning out right, of a daughter who sojourns to Ashrams,
of the tastiest monkfish in old town, of walking,
at 70, the Camino de Santiago…

The comfortable hum of humans telling stories,
like glad frogs throat-singing our way into the night,
and like those frogs, we stay mostly below the surface;
almost always keeping nine-tenths of us out of sight —
like icebergs, only warmer.

And occasionally, perhaps because of that warmth,
there’s a crack beneath the surface
that exposes more of you than you’d intended,
but is received with openness, and understanding,
and even if you’ll never see these people again,
it doesn’t cancel out the surge of hope that washes through you,
restoring to flight, the bird of your worth,
charging the sails of your courage,
making you feel you’ll weather the creeping indignities of aging,
the squalls of dying.

What’s the word? There should be a word for the wave of yearning,
the lake of thanksgiving, you feel for all the people
that pass through your life,
that have added to your life.

And even as the gaps of time and place between our lives
grow wider, like rowboats drifting away from a dock,
never count it as loss!

Here’s the headline:
The human spirit has risen above the human condition.
To sustain it, is a grand hope, but not out of reach.
It happens all the time; it can happen anywhere;
as it happens every day, during happy hour,
at the Luna Solaqua in Albufeira.

Inscription at the entrance:
“Nós ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos.”)
“We bones that are here, for your bones we wait.”

Step into the bone chapel in Evora, Portugal,
and the little mix-up you had at the hotel,
or the rain that’s ruined your beach day, or
the limp lettuce and skewer of overcooked squid —
is forgotten, terminou!

And when you leave, minutes, or, seemingly, days later,
you vow to send your family and friends personalized postcards,
telling them, “I’ll never forget the height of the sun on the door
the hour you were born.” Or, “What a delicious, brazen wonder,
to be living on this earth, at the same moment as you.” Or,
“Watching you weed the garden was part of my destination.”

Like a perpetual Ash Wednesday, like a near-death experience,
just the shock of it, like a cudgel, like a shout, wake up! O dreamer,
to your one and only life!

Yet, a moment later I’m snapping pictures.
The young couple beside me take smiling selfies, say, ghoulish!
say, like, sooooo eerie! then walk across the square
and down the alley to the pub — content with brochure info:
how the 16th-century cemeteries were overcrowded
so the Franciscan monks dug up 5000 bodies,
prepared mortar, became skilled layers of skulls,
femurs, fibulae, radii, humeri.

I won’t be back so I linger a bit longer, try, like the old monks,
to honour the souls these bones once bore; try, but fail,
to feel that singular silence that travels in us,
and travels with us after we are gone.

The world is a hard place and our bones are hard enough
to endure for many years. Likewise, our skulls — their architecture,
not unlike the domes of cathedrals; how they hold the instruments
of praises and curses, how they house the passageways
of wonder and delight, sorrow and heartache.

How in the midst of this trip, our friend and travelling companion,
hears of the death of his mother.
How a friend back home is facing his cancer.
How every one of us has drunk the grief of intimate loss,
and will drink more.

We are, of course, all dying, all flowing forward,
swept up, getting snagged, yet flowing, all members
of this brilliant kaleidoscope of beauty and mystery.

And now it’s spring, the reckless season, the ribald season
of resurrection, where, right out my window the earth
is enrobing — slipping into its great florid garment.

All of which makes one wonder,
as we live and breathe and move about,
in these, our temporary bone temples,
why, we can’t be sufficiently kinder.

We stand on the Algarve cliffs looking out at the Atlantic.
My eyes are drawn far up and over the curve of the water,
and I have that strong sensation of homesickness,
for a place that is not my home.

The ocean is a conjurer of yearning,
and I am a paperback its waves leaf through.

My plot could be thicker, my lacunae narrower,
but I stand nonetheless,
with a mist of praise on my lips,
and watch the sun ascend through a burnt-orange brine,
while silver wisps of cloud court the morning,
and the mouths of yellow sea daisies open in devotion.

North, from the coast to the sheltered valleys of the barrocal,
the olive trees are nourishing themselves, preparing to bloom.
The citrus trees have seasoned, the roadsides are dotted
with wooden crates holding mesh bags, bulging with oranges,
lemons, you can pick from the car. Farther up the serra
are carob, almond, stone pine, and cork oak.

On a hill, cows graze beside a fallen castle, vines twine
over stone and moss-ruined mortar. Everything
but the Azores ivy is given over to gravity.

We drive through villages, walk their mazes of tiled alleys,
enter their sandstone chapels and vaulted churches —
much of the sacred imagery is lost on me.
But I am a tourist with vacationing eyes,
what do I know about the woman whose head is bowed?
whose hands are cupped in supplication, whose very body,
before the dark carving of Christ, is a depiction of prayer.

In the town squares are markets. We buy figs and fresh almonds;
sample port, red, tawny, ruby; we eat monkfish, cataplana
with cod and cockles, the lamb stew is questionable, but the sea bass
was caught this morning, and the wine is cheap and good.

I want to listen to Fado, that profoundly melancholic music
peculiar to Portugal. It would have paired well with the stew;
as would have the Neil Diamond impersonator in Albufeira.

Always, there are gothic cathedrals, soaring pointed arches,
flamboyant rose windows held in webs of stone tracery,
and towering belfries, where white storks copulate,
their considerable joys sound like faraway machine-gun fire.

We stroll the dark cloisters, enter the airless naves,
the apses, beyond decorative, yawn with gold-leaf opulence;
lavish statues, extravagant knotwork, the busts, the figurines,
altogether, none so rich as the deep ochre cliffs,
the sea, the sand, the sun, to where we’ll return.