In Admiration and Support of Climate Frontliners

Earthrise was captured on December 24, 1968, by astronaut Bill Anders during the Apollo 8 mission. It’s been described as “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken” (Time Life Pictures / Getty Images)

“It gained this iconic status, people realized that we lived on this fragile planet and that we needed to take care of it. This is the only home we have and yet we’re busy shooting at each other, threatening nuclear war, …it amazes me.” Bill Anders, December 24, 2018, (The Guardian)

Christmas Eve, 1968, in a TV broadcast back to earth the Apollo 8 crew signed off by reading from the book of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. …And God saw that it was good.”

 

There’s something about fog over a prairie slough,
the way it lies down and stretches
right over the cattails around the edges,
like a cotton compress over an open wound.

The world, the whole wide world,
needs such a fog, cleansing, healing,
then lifting, revealing new skin,
blue as a hatched bird’s belly
and shiny as a dolphin
breaching on a Pacific horizon,
under a rainbow scar.

It’s like what God had in mind, that business
with the flood. Major housecleaning.
Take everything away, God thought,
and they’ll come back wanting something different.
Lesson not learned, says
wildfire pandemic,
says ruthless economics.

Looks like we’ve mistaken our adolescence
for adulthood, and our Mother’s gifts for commodities,
appears we’ll manage our own decimation,
if not annihilation,
just fine.

We of the sputtering eidos; wicks
guttering out in the ornamental pools at the plaza;
we of the lost ethos, wandering about
like Carthusian monks in an airport.

Thankfully, there are those among us who still seek
directions; who make colour copies,
with tear-off phone numbers, of our lost planet —
that first photograph taken from space —
and staple them to street posts around town;
who send out doves, ravens, desert bats,
and wait for a fresh plucked olive leaf.

Mercifully, there are those among us who still live
for the sake of others, who rise every morning
to pay what we owe the child coming after us,
and so help the earth metabolize its grief
and restore to our once good globe
a portion of its peace and wildness.

It should put the lot of us on hold,
quieting our boats, listening anew for whale song,
quitting our combustion and turning around 
to watch through scud clouds
for a flash of wing.

 

To The Ministry of Faith

 

For your files, please find attached a brief history and my current position statement:

I had my reasons for leaving:
(Although ‘reasons’ imply a logical process, so misses precision.)

it was the 70s and the doors of perception were swinging open;

then came the 80s and all the techniques, formulas, methods
for self-actualization took up the entire self-deflating decade;

then the 90s, and crisis’ of faith were all the rage,
which didn’t mean they weren’t real;

meanwhile, skating into the new millennium, my faith,
overwhelmed by life, lost an edge, and fell, as it were, on its ass.
As such, I kept leaving.

Just as now, beyond any nugget of nostalgia,
I have my reasons (bearing in mind the thing about “reasons”)
for returning:

because starlight is seeping through some crack in my greying skull;

because once, walking in a coastal forest,
I heard singing (perhaps Love’s own largesse),
and was driven to praise,
like a pod bursting;

because I’ve been invited to a gathering of fierce merciful women
to witness the wild and tender wisdom of the feminine soul;

because I’ve worked in the garden, eaten their mint, grown alert
to my tacit collusion with privilege, prepared, now,
to return to town with pockets full of seeds;

because faith no longer tastes like a Happy Meal
or sounds like a perky litany or comes in the form
of a weekly appointment, or is resolved by so-called
clear-headed treatments of beautifully beguiling scriptures;

because faith is not a state, but is energy, oriented,
has no object, is God-less—so to be in God,
is comprehended through incomprehension,
gained through lack, restored through loss;

is a way of walking — willowing in a prairie wind
with a wreath of truths, open to fields of doubt,
furrows of disbelief (once called heresy) —
it’s swimming in a river of strange relations,
(entangled mystery of kinetic connections),
this immense novel, where, wondrous, surprising,
I’ve found I have a hand at writing the chapter writing me;

because now, where I am, it’s cooling and cast over with clouds
and the sun is going down and night is coming on and
the fortunes of loss, pain and grief are having their way
and I’ve fallen in love with everything fallible and fragile,
and momentary: this blundering human tide
that binds and blinds yet bears the image – Beloved.

 

Brash Rookie at Relationship

For Deb, my lifetime hiking companion.


35 years ago today, I was this brash rookie at nuptial relationship,
confident I could stick-handle my way
through any defense line and score;
would even use crap metaphors like that
and think, Geez Steve,
you’ve captured the profundity of commitment.

35 years ago I said things like, “I can’t imagine living without you,”
or, “As long as I have you, nothing else matters,”
or, “ I need you more than air,” no, I’m sure I never said that,
maybe something abbuting.

You remember, right?
those things you said — on and around your wedding day,
dedication day, celebrate-the-bond day —
you said with conviction.
Well, speaking personally, besides the nominal cheese,
there was a big load of “I” and “my” in them.
I mean, just when you’re hitting the honeymoon road,
“You are my everything,” upon close inspection, 
breathes cling wrap, has this weird veneer of sticky fear, 
could almost say: patina of possession.

Thing is, it’s not altogether conscious,
and about those gushes, you’re not being dishonest,
hell, you’re as genuine as the days of your life,
but there’s no anchor to it,
the amber hasn’t set yet.
You’ve no idea the number of fender benders
that’ll need estimates, costly repairs.
And it’s the fool who thinks he can get it done on the cheap:
some 25-year-old pastor’s filler-putty,
Clint’s In ‘n Out Counselling.

Well there you go, I still use crap metaphors,
but 35 years later,
when I tell her, “There’s just you and me sweetheart,”
I think, funny how some cheese ages tasty,
or when I say, “I need you more than air,”
(which I actually said to her just now!)
I’m not sure I could muster anything truer.

 

Rough Drafts

 

All is Love, Love is All.
Every morning I listen to these lines,
the ethereal voices, the honeyed harmony,
the music passing through me like filaments of dawn,
and I’m candle-dipped into the day’s promise,
a believer, a faith-keeper.
But then, suppose some governmental missional jackals
came and took away my children,
asked me to sing from the Broadman Hymnal,
what song could I possibly sing?

*

In their sickness, on their cot of languishing,
God said (Psalm 41, you can look it up),
I’ll make your bed,
which means,
according to the rigorous expositor Matthew Henry,
they can expect some recompense of temporal wellness,
provided they’re free of trespass,
provided they’re of the elect,
provided the Exchange is open,
provided it’s bullish.

*

The last thing I want to do is preach, which
is of course the last thing you want to listen to.
Instead, I’d like to give you an amulet,
as vigilant, mighty, and friendly as a Pacific hemlock,
perhaps too, a chorus of crickets,
oh, and an otter, whose happiness
exceeds that of many clams.

*

They’ve gotten used to shouting across the canyon
(with its striking similitude of the 6th-floor ward),
and no one answering.

*

I’m healthy,
I can afford to contemplate God’s predilections (silence,
long holidays, etc.) or the prayers of Russian pilgrims, or
or Brené Brown’s walkable wisdom or Deepak
Chopra’s meditative dance steps (think Blue heron, wading),
or the reverie of Eckart Tolle,
who on last count has written 198 books
including the famed Power of Now, which apparently
has condemned him to write forever,
and condemned us to forever feel
not quite up to code.

*

On the electric bed where they lie prone,
glazed by saline drops,
expecting miracle knives,
they are given a small cup of yogurt,
and discharged — which is an appropriate name for the Acute Unit,
an explosion of assertion —
then a spent shell.

*

I hurt, I worry — like you perhaps — I get panic attacks,
but I can make a giraffe out of two slender balloons
and I know a couple of killer knock-knock jokes.

*

The other day, while reading a favorite poet,
cradled on the cusp of a contemplative moment,
I paused to fire a stone at an annoying magpie.

*

Mostly, I am fluid and tender,
a clear-eyed non-avenger,
a gangster for grace, a mercy ninja, friend,
I’d walk with you
if you left that Holy Book, you cock like a left hook,
at home.

*

(Dear Mr. Henry, how can I explain to you that your roar of Religion
is not the voice of revelation;
a covenant is not a contract,
and Jesus is not God’s Janus-faced emissary.)

*

I’m an index finger, beckoning the Milky Way
to be the street lights by your house.
I’m a bamboo shoot in your bedroom, say the word
and I’ll bleed you a chandelier of flowers.

*

I’ve lost weight.
I shimmy when I walk.
I skinny when I dip.
I keep a list of regrets.
One of which is preferring my own company.
Then again, at least there’s only one person to argue with.

*

Reality is an alternating current,
someday down the wire,
we’ll slip right through an ‘off’ moment.

*

Love is all and the world is still beautiful
and there’s a friend who’ll call,
O my, that sweet dulcet voice rising out of a canyon.

*

I don’t even care that I get my peonies
mixed up with my hydrangeas,
both give me instant gratification. What’s not to love?

*

Once on a ferry going to Salt Spring, standing in the spray
and watching the mist riff the rocks above the waves,
I fell more deeply in love.
I wish I could explain how there’s something like a flame
just above your head.