At the Gravesite

 

“I’d rather be cremated,” he said.

We stood in a prairie graveyard, a late fall wind blew through
a faded red snow fence and a row of poplar trees,
their leaves already shaken free.

“I was taught cremation was unnatural,” I said. “In the church
I grew up in, it might have been illegal, now it seems sensible.”
“True,” he said, “and besides, how else to be buried
in different places at once — every lapping seacoast, if I had my say.”

“Me? near the old farm, that bend by the bridge on the Whitesand River,
and that wide open bay on Hornby Island, and the abandoned
forestry lookout my son and I hiked to, above Rocky Lake.”

“Of course it requires the good will of others, family can be lazy,
you could get thrown out of someone’s car window.”

“Anywhere along the Yellowhead is fine.” I said.
“What about people needing a place to visit?”
“All the better to have your ashes scattered over the country —
no one has to drive far.”

The pastor was gripping the lapels of his coat with one hand
and held a bible with the other, many words went up into the wind.

“I like the thought of my ashes caught in the grass,” I said,
“caught in the rain, absorbed by soil, my atoms ending up
in different forms, yet held, alive and seeing, in the Divine,
the all of me in a molecule, blinking out from the bloom
of an orange hawkweed,
growing in the ditch by our old cabin north of Edmonton.”

They were lowering my cousin into the earth with one of those
chrome-frame scaffold cranes. We watched as an older brother
threw a handful of dirt on the coffin.

“It looks like oblivion,” he said. “There’s nothing here
to convince me that consciousness survives.
It may be healthier to accept what’s apparent than to dream
of some kind of afterlife, whether on silver streets in golden clouds,
or in that orange flower of yours.”

“Oblivion is one truth. That there is a persistent mystery
begging attention at the heart of our existence is another.”

“The truth? We die.”
          “But we resist.”
“That’s evolution.”
          “That’s something built into the soul.”
“That’s animal survival.”

People were gathered around the bright-green fake-lawn carpet
that covered the mounds of dirt. They were singing,
Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,
and the wind under a slate sky was blowing hard.

“I’ll give you this,” he said, “there’s lots we don’t yet know about ashes,
lots we don’t know about the infinite number of ever-changing
information-bearing patterns.”
“Perhaps all part of one grand pattern?”
“I see where you’re going, but God is a problem.”

The pastor asked for a moment of silence. Under the grey light,
wet faces, shielded with scarves and raised collars, turned toward the casket.

“Any genuine experience of love is God.”
“Or,” he said, “any genuine experience of love is a physical phenomenon
exhibiting the fertile force of that fourteen-billion-year-old accident,
and that my grateful acknowledgment is on par with your worship of God.”

“You have a strong point — it leaves me, necessarily, to fall back on mystery.”

“There are imperious nihilists here, as you have adolescent crusaders there,
mirrors of each other, but the problem with many of you believers,
is that you think we nonbelievers lead shrunken lives,
sealed off from transcendent experience; but beauty, for instance,
enlarges life for me, as much as for you. My capacity for joy,
and grief, is not diminished because I believe in a material world.
You say God, I say physics, albeit, wondrous.”

“I think I say God before physics.
But I suppose we part ways here: for me, joy, sorrow, beauty, awe, all point
beyond a material world; awe, without an end, seems like dread,
potentially ending in despair. Although, that said,
dread, oblivion, the void, may also be a means to deeper seeing.

Some people were moving back to their cars, deliberate, slow bodies
lost in memories, lost in bewilderment, belief, unbelief, grace, pain.

“Suppose,” I said, “we were glimmerings in the mind of God (what love!)
even before that supermassive bang? Then, the quantum news
that we are one with everything around us, gives way
to a newer-older news, that you, me, all things, are at every moment,
in a relationship with that Mother force — God,
before we are in relationship with anything, with anyone.
How then should I approach the world and every living being,
if not with great reverence?

“Well, in this,” he said, “we are kin my friend, we live towards
the affections we hold, using different forms of navigation,
until some new information (revelation?) changes, modifies,
solidifies (maybe reverses?) this drift to disorder.”

We stood, our backs to the gusts, in a sort of silent covenant,
brothers, in a kind of searching wonder,
a wonder that only wind has the words to utter.

Car doors were open, but people were still in clusters,
holding one another, elbows held in palms,
hands folded in hands, arms linked, some embraced
as to shatter, as to deepen, the ice of grief,
some simply hugged,
if a hug can ever be called simple.

 

The Healing Game

 

The Walmart dracaena is losing its leaves, the soil is too wet, compacted,
she will find a more generous pot, set its roots free,
help it stand again.

If it was spring and if there was space behind this townhouse,
she’d be putting plants in the ground.

When she drove out to Alberta in the fall
she made a point of taking her sowing machine and scraps of material.
While she waits, she builds a quilt.

There is a drive in her to mend things, change things,
hem the curtains, make this basement bedroom look roomier, create
the illusion of space for a living room.

She has attacked the aging carpets with steam,
the floors and fixtures and worry with vinegar.

Today she is painting walls a brighter shade of yellow,
sometimes it takes three coats for her to be satisfied.

Soon there will be paintings, framed photographs, she will find them,
she knows where to look, knows how to blend colours, how to
soften walls with images.

Goodwill is her zendo, her place for gathering ideas and furniture and fittings.

In the laundry room, off the bedroom, she has created a kitchen.

In the evening, beside the closet that doubles as sewing room, she reads,
rests, on her steam-cleaned Goodwill chaise lounge in our living room.

Morning, through the glass patio doors still frozen to their metal sliders, 
she watches a blush of red under the taut gray-flag sky, and remembers
a Van Morrison song, called, Fire In the Belly:

gotta get through January, gotta get through February,
gotta get through January, gotta get through February.

On that same album there is a song called, Healing Game:
Sing it out loud, sing it in your name, sing the healing game,

sing the healing game,
sing the healing game.

There is a fire in her to see something grow, a hunger
to see something stand again, green and tall, full of sap and flowering,

while she caretakes, while she waits,
endless months for her son to rise, to stand,
to see a sunrise.

 

Something We Don’t Pray For

 

And standing on the rim of the new year
with, undoubtedly, too much hope,
and at the same moment, too much worry,
like middle managers returning from a monastic retreat,
we gather at the mouth of this first Monday and genuflect
a kind of benediction over the months ahead, Keep them, we pray,
from the fox shark dimension of the human condition.

Perhaps this year someone siting up late arranging the clauses
of complex sentences, will stumble
upon a working description of the soul,
leading to an adequate unpacking of the heart, such that,
nothing of the self would stay hidden from the self.

It wouldn’t be pretty.
There’d be howls of, My God, so that’s what I’ve been doing!
There’d be a lot of journalling, stuff you wouldn’t want to read;
but then, we’d all be in it together.

There’d be a rush on white orchids, Etsy jewelry,
elephant plush cuddle buddies, wrapping paper,
and actual postage stamps.

Both Christianity Today and Psychological Review would publish
retractions on the functions of forgiveness.
Fox News and CNN would stop masturbating.

Presidents, four-star generals, chief officers,
would meet with committees of plants and animals
to tear up Exclusive Rights documents.

Narrative therapy counsellors would be in demand, a demand
exacerbated by said counsellors seeking their own counsellors
before re-hanging their shingles.

Where I am going, you cannot come, said Christ,
and true to his word, he left us
                                                          here,
then sent his ethereal partner, also a counsellor,
to keep us off bridges, or give us floaties.

Rumours persist she occasionally whispers
to midnight scribblers.
Then again, persistence is in the nature of rumours.

But apparently, so I’ve heard, there’s a painter who’s been listening,
who’s painting with gesticulating sweeps,
and grand flurries of colour,
a diptych:
It’s what we don’t pray for that breaks us.
It’s what we can’t pay for that saves us.

 

Not Far Off – Something Bright

 

Perhaps the old year will pull away like a train,
leave us standing on the platform
under an oleander dawn,
wanting to bloom.

And not far off, as close as January,
something bright, coming down the tracks,
new but recognizable,
like a garden on wheels.

Those colours and tastes of childhood,
no matter how much gloss we add,
no matter how many brands we buy,
don’t happen anymore.
And to try for auld lang syne is to toy with madness.

That small craze of clearing out our closets was a good thing.
Look what we’ve kept.
Even here, in this sprawling city, are ponds,
left to the ducks, and green ribbons
left to themselves, connecting the divisions.
And that’s something.

But why stop there, we’ve got this new year.
Let it all grow wild, let the heart walk free
of the need to master our tears,
to curb our burgeoning love, for fear
of being sentimental,
even rejecting the surprises of kindness,
because we weren’t prepared.

Let it all grow.
We know we want to.
It’s permaculture.
Let it grow in the sun and the wind and even the storms,
this tangle, even if we could, doesn’t need undoing.

Let us rejoice in the confusion
of these vines running through us, connecting us,
suddenly blooming.

 

Wishing you a beautiful New Year!