you must be weirdly young or brazenly old,
alternatively, a sufferer and a worshipper, a defender

less driven by grievance (that old rut),
than curiosity,
and like your outrageous aunt who refuses to knit,
enchanted by bewilderment,

yet, irrevocably lost, and desperate, without
your partner’s goodnight kiss,
her smile in the low light.

True, the signs are real, the crown fires, the sky rivers,
are real,
the toxic cumulus, the wizened arbutus,

the fan palm shedding its propellers, the drought-cracks
in conifers, the ant invasion in the kitchen,
the vicious noise of Lockheed Martin,

grottos crumbling, cities excreting, our soiled empire,
with its fallen doctrine of eternal growth, turning

to the marvels of modern detergents, the whitening agents,
spreading,

a dusting of fascism, thickening, darkening,
dust devils hinting at tornados,

our attendant fear like a street dog following,

our convenient ear wax, our companionable cataracts,
Like in the thirties, my dad would have said, not enough alarm,

even the book of Revelation, despite its mythical construction
and preterist interpretation,
feels real.

Let the beauty of the Lord be upon us,
cried the Psalmist, anguished

like Judas, weeping and repentant,
on the highway from Golgotha,

like Mary Magdelene, at the open sepulchre, weeping, stooping,
peering,

and just here, at the point of giving up, the rose appears,
and one becomes its fool.

 

 

I didn’t know that when my father died, he’d be back,
and wearing his robin’s-egg-blue suit to Sunday dinner,
his tie loosened, jacket slung over the oak armchair,
his tanned face, his white forehead from his Co-op cap,
and under those pale blue eyes, flashing like specula,
his full smile, like a favourite sweater you can wear
all day, where we, his quarter-acre of family,
lingered into the cool of the evening.

When that scene, six months after his burial, settled
into the cells of my dreams, I searched in vain for a word
to match this kind of reaped-joy-from-sown-tears contentedness.

That was almost thirty years ago, when I still didn’t know
that if you listen close enough, you’ll hear the northern lights
sing, Glory in the Highest, or that if you linger long enough,
the staggering intricacy of a dandelion, gone to seed,
will rinse your day in silver, or that if you plant your hands deep
in soil, the tide of your blood will sync with the earth, or that when
you finally let go of your pick-ax, as well as many other things,
a gold seam in the deep mines of your soul, will appear.

These are things I picked up without knowing — while walking
with him across a stubble field to a stuck tractor, while watching sparks
fly past his welding helmet, while seeing him at his small desk
in a cramped corner at the back of our store, head bowed,
the light from his green lamp circling around a wave of black hair —
things that only now have set up camp within my heart.

How I pray, when my day has come and gone,
my own sons would find me
in such a dream.

 

 

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.