Walking through a hayfield in south Saskatchewan, and sage
fills my head, and bromegrass and timothy—leaning toward autumn—
have turned rust-brown. And the toadflax and nodding thistle
laud the ground they’re on, and use the breeze to hum,
and chokecherries praise the meadow,
and paint my mouth a fervent purple,
then shock it dry. And the field says,
do not sigh for something else,
dwell in this world as it is.

In Saskatoon we meet, at long last, our great-granddaughter, Elise.
We sit in the backyard. Sun shines through the cottonwood
and spreads over her tiny bonnet. Her little hands pull up bits of grass
and find her mouth, and she smiles, so wide, adding light to light,
and the ceaseless wheels of a troubled world come to rest.
And the cottonwood says,
do not look for something else,
dwell in the world as it is.

Driving west now, along fields of ripe barley,
through the inglorious histories of the Battlefords,
and further on, a horizon of pump-jacks and ordinary industrial blight.
At sundown we stop and stealth-camp in Kitscoty, which is not Kyoto
and the slough at the edge of town is not the shining waters of Biwa,
but even here, deep calls to deep; the marsh wren is a benediction;
and Everywhere is inscribed by the indelible chorus of a loon.
And the horizon says,
do not clamor for a future Kyoto,
dwell in your world as it is.

Red Deer morning. I look across the flowered backyard into the alley
to where my father-in-law left this life. On the mantle there’s a picture:
his beamish smile and a rose in his lapel. Yesterday. Rundle Park.
A dragonfly lands on my shirt, very near my heart, it clings there
while I go about setting the picnic table with pizzas and fizzy water.
The kids of nieces and nephews spare no energy on the jungle gym,
spread their delight and passion through the park.
And I am caught by the untellable love of “a living flash of light,” *
all my possessions and yearnings unclasp,
and I am released,
free and alive,
into this needful world.

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* from The Dragonfly, by Alfred Lord Tennyson

 

---

 

 

Because this is a world I didn’t make, and it is real,
and the realer it feels, the more mysterious;

because one day, walking with my dad on a willow-lined trail
toward Good Spirit Lake, I was lifted out of the boy into a swirling world
of joy, and I’ve yet to fathom a why;

because reason is too weak to raise what is dead;

to honour the life of a sparrow;

to attend the spell of a dead star, whose light we still see;

to throw a wrench into a world geared up for business;

to feel,
down to the bone,
the quantum foam,
we flail in;

to convince you of your own divinity;

to oppose injustice and hate in a way that excludes no one;
not even the hater;

because over the years, I’ve fallen in love with a monk,
quite a few teachers, and a dead philosopher;

because I’m angry, envious, resentful, and fearful,
and still, there’s all this love in me;

because there’s a language within language always waiting—
like a silent cry;

because our glossary of mockery needs a funeral,
and the lexicon that’s left, needs new anointing.

because, in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God, and how else do you plumb that?

to let failure, discouragement, suffering and death, have their say,
without any spoon of bromide;

to thicken compassion and thin out aggression;

because there’s an old notion called vision, that religion,
under natural sunlight, might be cause for unification;

meaning: Love spells the end of religion;

to find a way to say, welcome your existential dread,
for it drives the search for Spirit;

because the most primitive (and abusive) form of comprehension
is literalism, and dear Lord, see how we’re slipping back!

to un-mire the mind, liberate the kidneys, and activate
the open hand;

because faith,
without resisting moneychangers in corporate temples,
is dead;

because poetry is political, and kindness is its administrative wing;

because, hatred into compassion, revenge into forgiveness—
eclipse all other miracles;

to find a thousand ways to say we are not our true selves,
until we sit, and eat, together;

because perennial amazement needs constant oxygen;

because in the time that’s left I want to tattoo the implications of Christ
on the ‘full body suit’ of my heart;

meaning: look around, the boundaries are gone, everything points to unity—
and we must hurry to catch the new reality—
the original, incarnate, emergent, reality;

for in the end, if joy has a why, it is harmony.

 

 

For the people of Jasper, Alberta.
For a friend who has heard hard news, and said, “It was like a bomb going off.”
For you, children of our unfinished creation, who know loss, suffering,
and still go to the aid of other people.

Linked Arms

When K. D. Lang sings Leonard Cohen’s, Hallelujah, the world must weep,
and should you hear the song before dawn and have it catch you
before the day’s hypnosis of busyness, you too, in that haltering,
blinking, moment, of being open to the utter reality of other people,
may weep, and suddenly, intimately, know the hurt
and loneliness a stranger endures, some child undergoes,
or some other burdened soul in our universal circle, bears,
and in the suffering of this necessary knowing, the given anguish
of compassion, you are carried into the morning—
actively human, and awake.

For we are not people who have seen the light,
we are, every one of us, broken hallelujahs,
we feel the chill of parting, the noose/abyss of loss, the cut of pain,
and we spend part of each day praying, for ways to carry on,
and after our bargaining is done, after the song ends, it turns out,
we do not carry on by way of revelation, or by any private victory,
or by devotion or special discipline, or by being on the side of right,
we rise, find our bearing and stand, only,
by way of linked arms.

 

All day long,
my mouth is filled with your praise. -Psalm 73

Praise the cliff behind our house,
the rappelling rope to Holland Creek,
the agility remaining in these aging knees;

praise these eyes that follow the stream,
still widen at the water’s glinting;

praise the wisp of haze
rising above the weir;

praise this skin that drinks the mist,
frissons, still, at the billion bursting bubbles;

praise these tears that dissolve the damage
of my dogged gloom;

praise the friend whose presence is shade,
whose words are salve;

praise the poet who pokes my sluggish soul,
the painter who awakens the heart;

praise the joy of a child at play,
weep at the idleness of our highly busy lives;

praise the truly content,
for they are commercially useless;

praise the attentive,
for they are the resistance;

praise the peace-filled protesters—
genuine rebels, original mystics;

praise the mocked and maligned,
those dissident dancers;

praise you, darlings of the Spirit,
howlers in wilderness, desert coyotes,
restless residents of a dark and violent time,
who still chose to love, and live, as though guests
of a free and mercy-forested world;

opposed by unavoidable conflicts,
condemned to countless failures,
still journeying, still yearning,
for the coming community
of vision;

praise my walking companion, my partner, my beloved,
God’s ingenious gift.