I wake at four and walk outside in the dark, in the silence of my slippers on gravel, my blue and white housecoat. I shoo away anything that isn’t sleeping, which this morning is a satellite, sailing, always, out of place among the rocketing fixity of stars. The Big Dipper directly overhead I line up the outside edge, find the north star. This is when I pray. Nothing long or involved, nothing like Calvin or the Russian pilgrims. I pray, “Love us, hold us, heal us,” add, “love me, hold me, heal me.” And while my heart sometimes condemns me, You do not. You, who I abandon in the dog afternoons and return to in the mornings, when I know I’ll have Your attention. Or is that perhaps mine? Soon enough I’ll return to doubting, confused, as many here are, by this long, strange war of vanity and violence over truth. Confounded even by my own perceptions, fury and sorrow, and wondering where, or if You are. But here, standing on these small stones by the gate looking up, knowing two comets are quite alive and swimming in the dark, under my homemade fountain, I believe: You, who can make a sun from nothing, who can raise a corpse, can shine a light on what remains of the light here. And every day I grow more desperate and kind.
Our souls, dear child, have grown scornful, our hearts are fastened on Wall Street, and our minds, fractious, intemperate, are furious with any headline we didn’t write.
Draw near us, untie us, depolarize us, shine across our fallen years and restore us.
Postage stamp photo, toothless and beaming, Tonka truck wheel at the back of a drawer, and in the attic, one-eared Mr. Floppy restore us.
Forgotten child, visit us, anoint us, mend our raw hearts with the skinned-knee bandage and kissed-knuckle ointment of a tender memory; mother
brushing off dirt, smoothing our dress, eyes bright and brimming, mirroring springs of innocence.
Minnow, turtle, crayfish, marsh, Yellow-headed blackbird, towering bulrush raft and creek and called-to-lunch restore us.
Dew-clotted lawn of our neighbourhood park, jungle gym, curvy slide, big swing under-duck,
I know a man who attracts hummingbirds wherever he goes, they flock and whirr and dart and fight to be the first to drink, he says not, but I think he may be a flower, perhaps begonia.
Another man I know parks a canvas chair by his cinder fire pit, uses tongs to bring an ember to the end of a Reloba cigar, leans back smiling, exhales a wild flight of a yarn, one time, while we listened and watched the fire, a cast of falcons flew out of his chest.
One man I know, familiar with surgical theatres, knows pain the way a leaf knows wind, over the years he’s learned to let butterflies cocoon him, cover him like a bandage, now when you meet him it’s like meeting a giant butterfly person.
One man, though he tried, couldn’t help becoming a preacher, his reluctance made him good, which made him famous, which constrained him to become a zebra, who as we know can be exacting, but he escaped it all through the limpid eyes of an egret, who are famously gentle with their young.
One guy I know wears two turquoise capes over a knee-length shift tied at one shoulder, he’s beautiful with that one exposed shoulder and those silver neck rings, and he sings like the scent of ripe mangoes, it’s possible he’s a renowned Pueblo Indian woman.
One man I know dreams in crisp sounds: glass heel on ceramic tile, hail stone on metal clad roof, five iron flush on a Titleist Pro, supple arch, bounce and roll to centre of a Bermuda pasture, 7 handicap, hits a 79, Buddha zone.
Another man I know, despite great loss, is surely a Scarlet macaw, if you visit, you’ll leave beaming; then again, he might be a nuthatch, he can walk up a tree backwards, to such height, birds fall from their perch, the hills clap, forests rejoice.
One man I know has invented a clever fractal lever to align the pulse of the universe to the movement of the human heart, when you’re near him it’s like roaming a meadow, knowing tranquil is always possible.
One young man I know is a little deer who lies on mown grass, he carries many wounds but his eyes are full of springtime and his spirit light as pollen, he is nectar to those that know him, and the partner of a begonia.
One man I know named his baby, Nova Rain Falling on Dry Grass, and named his son, Scent of Cedar, and another, Green Oblation of the Given Earth, right there you can tell he’s a good father.
I myself have five sons: Sagacious Raven, Sociable Kestrel, Stellar Jay of Decryption, Tibetan Rosefinch and Tropical Clef Swallow, they all tell me there are too many birds in my poems, I say, don’t worry, poetry will die, the Sun will win.
If you are a modern person you won’t have a clan, tribe or village, where you can go crashing through gates, drunk with grief, your indigenous soul seared, severed by the flint edge of loss, the ache of it on your head, neck, back, pack and tumpline straining under the weight of it, you, reeling, staggering, crazed and calamitous, yet accepted and understood, for as much time as it takes to find your route through and back home.
If you are a modern person, you may not even have a community or an extended family to attend you, to receive you. That’s fine. You only need one good friend to be your designated non-griever,
who will lead you to a private spring, brook, lake, or even a stretch of ocean, womb of the earth, and listen, as you speak your grief into the waves. You can say it all to the water, sink into the drowning of what’s missing. You can thrash, scream, curse, you can roar revenge, you can squirm in the sand, fling shale, run in loops, become a raging fool, a shitfaced symphony. Your sober non-griever will watch out for you,
won’t counsel you about proper restraint, the millennia of cultural conditioning: the resolute pause, the pious posture, the washed-face of moving on that seals off the great sobs, dams a torrent of tears, freezes rage or residual hate, and cuts off the path to praise.
Your non-griever-listener will taste your suffering, will hold your heartache without a hint of subtraction or assimilation, and wait, keep you fed, give you a blanket, produce a candle, help steer in time your mess of pain to the sea, and the water, wondrous teacher, will swallow it, and the tides will churn it, and you, steadier now, may recall a time you danced with what you loved, and praise, grief’s elegant twin sister, who’s presence is loss- turned-courageously-back-to-life- in-the-service-of-love, will surface.
* The phrase “designated non-griever” is taken from the writings of Martín Prechtel.
