The week has taken a toll. Someplace on the walls of my stomach, things are not well. But the week is ending and I will begin shedding it by reading poetry.

I have the idea that reading poetry shores up our souls. And Lord knows we need the shoring.

Reading poetry in the fall is like pushing up dirt in front of our holes in preparation for winter. It’s like stashing pine cones in trees, like making preserves, like harvesting, getting the crops in.

A few choice perceivingings in the root cellar of our heart and the larder of our souls can keep us from starving in a cold, calculating, and indifferent world. That’s what I think.

Yesterday we celebrated Bob’s 60th Birthday.

He was given a few hours leave from the hospital–complications from established cancer.

But we remembered to celebrate.

And Bob, couldn’t help but play. He had an audience at the Clyde Drop-In Centre. As Ken (drummer) said, “He’s in gig-mode.”

More of life’s certain pain and enchantment.

I gave him a poem:

Dear Bob,
I remember,
the day a low harvest sun came streaming into your garage,
its rays refracted by stirred up dust,
stirred by moving feet, light feet,
all motion behind microphones and drum skins,
pulsed by bass and bass pedal,
and voices, and harmony almost like falling water,
and you, Bob,
standing behind your intimate one,
a red three-thirty-five Gibson, holding her,
casual, familiar, like a long time lover,
that day, I thought I might die with delight.
Later—on that week’s end,
up under the lights,
you vibrate,
your eyes alive, full of cherry light and mischief and the ghost of Elvis.
You scream Nadine,
and you’re off like a flying fox on your fret board,
and I wonder, with this bubble in my throat,
wonder how it is on that side,
and I wish I could be there with you.
Your home on stage.
On a dime you joked our hearts into springtime,
until we groaned for you to stop.
But you kept laughing just the way we wanted you to.
You bragged once, to someone I don’t recall,
how I could bend two strings with my ring finger,
and so I followed you, married to a new possibility,
and new music.
When our lives fell apart you patched yours with music,
always music to staunch the bleeding,
shoring yourself up,
with your red guitar.
Well, you understood her moods.
She would lie like a scarlet sunset in your hands.
Or like a crimson dawn,
she anticipated your moves and played for you,
even in the still-dark.
Wrapped in her six strings you gave her your nine lives,
give her still, and she gives back,
and in that giving you gave us a part of our own lives,
a part that’s bright and still burning.
You my friend,
always adding more melody to this need-filled world,
and to this lonely-hearted world, more music.

September 30, 2007

Yesterday during a few stolen moments I had read poetry. Yesterday, before I heard the news of the freak death of the son of old friends, I had read this poem:

You tell me on your birthday
your wife’s best friend gave birth;
hours later, her mother died.

You can’t understand so much joy
and grief in one day.

I tell you of the monks in Tibet,
who eviscerate the corpses,
with four long knife cuts in the morning sun,
then let the vulture’s have their fill.

One monk crushes the bones,
mixes them with barley
for the vulture’s last meal of the day.
Nothing’s left.

The Buddhists call it sky burial:
the soul’s shortcut to Nirvana.

There is no sense to things,
I tell you, nothing to understand;
only life’s certain pain
and the vultures waiting
for the next soul
to carry on their wings.  -Wendy Morton 

Unless we are put to shame in our hope, a worry at least one Psalmist had, our crazy hope is all we have.

But when night falls on you like a hammer, when life as you know it ends–full stop–where does hope go then? Where do the painted ponies, the golden fields, the scarlet sunrises go then?

No Nirvana, no heaven, no round and round, no circle game, no hope.

Now is not the time for hope. Not right now. Hope would only mock.