What I want from you is your attention. It’s been so long since I’ve felt any kind of fire for you. Where’s the plunging passion? I want to sing Holy, Holy, Holy, inside those flames again. I know I can’t live in that heat, but I need another shimmering moment — a splash of sun on my stone wall, a burst of apricot on my parched tongue — just to remind me of what it was I saw in you. Remind me how I loved you, and might love you still. I’m no pilgrim supplicant, no discalced Carmelite, no wandering mystic with a God-shaped gap in my soul. I’m a blue-collar poet, retired mission worker, grain buyer, weed inspector, I’m someone’s partner, I’m a dad for god’s sake, asking for some help here. Please, see if you can find a coal lying about on the pitted bricks of my heart, blow on it, make it smoking-red, right up to the point I can hardly stop myself from grabbing the next passerby to give them a hug of a lifetime. Stand on a street corner, blissed and drunk on devotion, high with longing and sinking into the non-duality at the bottom of this world; dead to the part of my ego that says I’m separate from everything. Instead, awake, and betting it all on Love. Losing myself in love, in the face of another, in the eyes of another, in the tears of another, in the arms of another; finding myself alive, alive and received, and finding what was lost, but for losing, was never lost; found by Love, before having loved, and having loved, found alive, received, arisen, as though death were past; and knowing there is nothing, no time, no want, no tenet, that love will not undo, no airy sanctuary, no earnest alter, no open minaret that love will not complete, no mawkish hope, no gilded creed, that love cannot defeat; love: the distiller, the distillation, the distillate; and you, yes, you, you who’ve come this far, I don’t know who you are, but I know you’re freaking amazing!

 

 

Our 93-year-old friend is reading the book, Being Mortal (Atul Gawande).

“I’m trying to figure things out,” he says, smiling. “I’ve read it before,
as an outsider, but now, well…”

We talk about mortality over potato pancakes and garlic sausage.

Not many months ago his partner of 60-plus years died.

“I couldn’t read, I couldn’t concentrate, I sat in my chair
and looked out at the empty patio.

“I was prepared for M’s death, and still,
I was thrown to my knees.”

Not all of us get to prepare. My partner, Deb, knows about this.
Her first husband to a car accident
(when she was pregnant with her first child),
her father to suicide.

Just weeks ago, a dear friend lost a sister-in-law to a freak accident.

Plunged in, or pulled slowly under, grief is still grief.

“Lately I’ve been thinking about the astounding, what, luck? chance? fate?
well, just the infinitesimal odds of me, of any of us, getting to be here.

“I think about me and M, our parents, and theirs, down the line,
I think about the chance meetings over the span of centuries,
and I just get lost in it all.”

Our friend is a teacher, in the big sense, grounded by losses,
practiced in gratitude, the tough kind, the kind that
doesn’t necessarily make you feel better, the kind that knows
when to speak, and when the only useful response is awe
and silent wonder.

He lives in an assisted-living home,
filled with mortals on their way.

As he walks us down the hall, past the lounge, the dining hall
past the walkers and wheelchairs, past the pain and anguish
of dissolving bodies, past all the stories, all the songs,
it’s not hard to think about the midnight sky, ablaze,
and all the stars that have died,
but whose light we still see.

And what else to do in this sacred landscape but breath in as much sorrow
as you can take, and breathe out as much comfort and peace and love
as you can muster.

It’s true that dying is an individual journey, but it’s also true
that we’re in it together,

and that when we turn toward grief’s night, rest in its dim wilderness,
our eyes adjust, and there in the darkness
is a kind of transfiguring treasure, like a small warming fire,
with many friends sitting around.

 

 

(From Psalm 131)

Lord, my heart is not haughty:

Of course, I had the advantage of birth: born in Springside,
voted least haughty hamlet in Saskatchewan.

Nor my eyes lofty:

One pretty much follows the other: farming town, curling rink,
proud of our blizzards, which kept us from taking the Yellowhead
to Yorkton — massive, unpredictable city.

Neither do I exercise myself in great matters:

Except one day I packed a bologna sandwich and rode my horse, Chummy,
hard, all the way to my cousin’s farm by the Whitesand River dam.
Later, Chummy, dying of colic, my uncle in mercy put him away,
leaving me stung and hollow, a puddle of regret, my adolescent presumption
causing the death of something I loved, something that large.

Or in things too high for me:

Like this ghost-pale moon,
weeping light over gopher-pocked pastures,
bringing cool June drizzle, brooding sloughs, and pain
that strains theodicy, and no arithmetic that joy will come in the morning.

Surely I have behaved and quieted myself:

I’m quiet, but it’s false to say it was of my own agency,
as truthfully, it’s growing old that’s quieted me,
it’s loss that’s taught me,
surrender to the Mystery.

As a child that is weaned of its mother:

From provinces away, my mother watched, heard news,
and loved me still — down all these galloping years,
she was always just across the room.

My soul is even as a weaned child:

Rogue child steps out the front door into the giant blue.
Seasons of sidereal dreams, mottled mist, leveling winds,
and the leavening light of a thousand sundowns: his habit now,
to bend a creaking knee, bow a greying head,
wipe his dimming eyes and trust the night.