Friendship

It Sometimes Happens when a Friend has Died

Posted on by stephen t berg / 14 Comments

As long as you read this poem
I will be writing it.
I am writing it here and now,
before your eyes…, —Alden Nowlan, “An Exchange of Gifts”

It sometimes happens that when a friend has died
and there is no funeral, no memorial, no farewell,
and the days pile in and routine has led you
to its temporary shelter; you find yourself
sitting down to an email, smiling about some incident
you need to share, and just before you click the address
you remember — and in the space of exactly one second,
memory flies you out over a horizon of clipped scenes,
walks you along a winding path of cropped stories,
and ends at a cliff overlooking a deep emptiness.

It sometimes happens while walking below those cliffs,
beneath the intertidal sky of grey hours,
between the froth and chop of collapsing waves
and looming walls of crumbling clay,
that a swallow swirls down, or a harbour seal comes,
swimming in currents roughly spiral,
adhering to a thing primal,
leaving no wake but curls of hurt,
and your soul, convinced by sorrow,
gives in to the gift of weeping.

It sometimes happens, then,
that you recall a poem by Alden Nowlan,
the one by your reading he is still writing,
as pledged, long after his death.
And in that flowering whorl of gifts exchanged,
obedient to the eddies of time,
you move toward the past, curving in ahead of you,
and from that spiral valence —
the known and unknown in full bloom —
your friend: still walking in wonder
along a treed path by a river,
stops, waves a greeting, waves farewell.

Understanding

Geometry of Dignity and the Etiquette of Possibility

Posted on by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

When we talk, don’t pull your chair up opposite of me
so that the only thing I can see is you,
sitting there like an inquisition.
And don’t swing your chair around to sit right beside me either, 
all chummy and knowing what’s what in my world,
how I feel, what I think, as though you’re seeing
exactly what I see.
Instead, move your chair to the side,
turned yet congruent, our knees concurrent,
our limbs forming an equilateral space,
let’s start like that, let’s talk there,
where words without glinting edges or presumptive sponges
can come or go or even stop for a while, without
any wilting inner-pressure, or poisoned partisan script,
where we can see one another, more than peripheral,
comfortable, seated at ease, at the sides of our eyes,
and where, yes, I can still see what you see,
and you can see what I see, but knowing, clearly,
we don’t have the same visual angle —
transparent to the fact, we each have our slant,
our scalene sides,
but aware, as well, of an intersection, not far off,
awake to the vectorial overlap of our views,
let’s start with that, let’s meet there.
Unless we are physically blind, in which case
let’s not speak over each other, or at each other,
like barking soliloquists,
better: let’s draw near enough to hear
the gradient range of waves,
diminishing decibels of receding storms,
find the geometric rhyme and rhythm of intervals,
dyadic dignity, tonal deference, chromatic obeisance,
take note of the clefs of harmony on a far horizon,
and free of any projected images, rest, here,
in the delicate absence of discord, this brief interlude,
the tremulous dawning of a new duet.

Life

Old Man finds Photo of Boy

Posted on by stephen t berg / 23 Comments

 

It’s early evening, the chores are done,
and the sun is setting on the 1960s.
Young people in San Francisco are conspicuously hip —
not one having heard of rural Saskatchewan.

Arms to his side, the boy poses in front of a farm house —
his home, faux-brick asphalt siding,
pitted concrete walk and step,
peeling tin water barrel,
coal box and canvass cover,
all set among a thinning thatch of scrub poplar,
and a path to a creek that has power over the boy.

He’s in the near-spring of his life,
lucky beyond measure,
wise in ignorance,
clever in innocence,
habituated to happiness,
dressed in his mother’s love and his sister’s handed-down clothes.

He’s fed on simple faith, homemade bread and thick cream —
cream he separated himself, butter he churned on his own,
and a faith he has no reason to question.

Within a season he’ll discover mirrors,
page the gloss of catalogues,
study urbanites, learn bohemian, read of New York,
listen to Chicago.

At the creek in the pond by the beaver dam, his body
swims naked beside him, now, mere and insufficient.
His sock-holes, farm-chores and hay-wagon extraction —
a gathering embarrassment.

By Easter, like Peter, he’ll betray his own setting,
erase himself from the scene.
All his dreams, full of distance.

He steps away from the boy,
takes measures to shroud him,
makes a plan to abandon him. Succeeds.

From his chair by the window on the island
the old man holds the photo, looks closer, steps inside —
the boy has his eyes closed:
     perhaps a flash bulb,
     perhaps a shaft of echoed sun,
     perhaps the anointing of the 23rd Psalm,
     perhaps a particular blindness
          that will be his long companion,
     perhaps all — and these: a prevenient prayer of forgiveness
for an old man, and, a prefiguring benediction
upon the necessary betrayal of what is,
          for other paths of possibility and uncertainty.

 

Aging/Elders/Wisdom

Wisdom and the Women who have Gone On Ahead

Posted on by stephen t berg / 10 Comments

The following was kindled by the writings of Stephen Jenkinson and his book, Come of Age, and by women I have known: the quiet courage of my own mother, three aunts, friends, Connie, Ginny, Dixie, and all those, regardless of gender, who have left this world enriched, and those who are yet living before us, aging graciously, purposefully, willingly, unconscious witnesses, unassuming mentors, true elders.

Wisdom and the Women who have Gone On Ahead

I was happy when she said to me, “Do not trouble yourself
with all those personal growth pamphlets.” You see, she’d seen
I was feeling quite inadequate, a feeling, I should add, that arrived
when everyone around, it seemed, was signing up for those courses.
She said other things too, like, “Trade your assurance,
(and by this I think she meant my clutched-to salvation)
for sorrow and sanity and the late coming chance of
getting it right.” And while I didn’t immediately understand,
I did find a kind of comfort in it, like the comfort I found
watching the last decade or so of Leonard Cohen’s life,
that dark saint of surrender. A man who stood so long,
with so much grace and discipline, at two minutes to midnight
that you can find him there still, even now, after he’s gone.
It’s a posture I now recognize in some others, I’d call elders,
this living before, nothing orchestrated, choreographed,
only simple honesty about limits and endings, this deepening
through diminishment and a willingness to mysteriously
slip away at some appointed hour. Not unlike well-aged wine,
spilled for us, “Take and drink,” she said, “for your sustenance.”
He spoke to me once, Leonard Cohen I mean, it was in a dream
and he said, “Why do you hang on to your one outrageous gift
as though it wasn’t given, as though its limits, its end, is not part of
what gives it meaning, depth, as though its end is not itself a gift?”
and when I awoke I felt I could settle into the dust and dry leaves,
the harrowing and winnowing, the bewilderment and uncertainty
of aging, with a sort of freeing courage, and I thought, yes,
this is what she meant,
and I raced back to tell her,
and found that she had quietly met her hour —
found her quietly gathered into wakefulness.