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My idea of faith was positional.
It would lift me above pain and madness,
self-absorption and sadness.

My idea of Church was a community of safety
and pleasantry; coffee time after the sermon,
and warm afternoons with like-minded souls.

My attachment to Benedictine spirituality
would shield me from this nervous world,
preempt its contagious neurosis.

My idea of God could be plotted on a balance sheet:
proper piety, amortized, would yield spiritual equity.

And a fixed-term assurance plan,
could have passed for my idea of Christ.

So how could I have understood that buried beneath
my attachments and ideas, was a savage and beautiful truth?
alive and burning; unless,
some soul-quake, some heart-rift, would cast off
the rotting cloak of my calculating mind;

to sit, empty of words and ideas, here

with my beautiful transgender son—whose years
of physical suffering are untenable and cruel
and loom, to make him an island.

And here, in this inconsolable afternoon
—that tempts me toward some form of numbness—
my child turns and reaches out to me.

And I, with my bitter charge of Why!,
my rolodex of resentments, my permafrost anger,
am dropped into a serenity, within agony,
a comprehension, without comprehending—
intimately entangled, held, crazily close
by an ever-present, suffering, Love—
through the eyes and in the arms of my own son.

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When we made it to our 80’s, we said, let’s go for 90.
But that cancer he took home from his mill job,
those decades ago, finally got him.

I keep looking for him, you know?
From the kitchen I keep turning to the dining room table,
where he always sat reading or figuring or planning.

I go out to the garden and I hear him out in our forest,
with his wagon and winch.
And then in the shed making something or other.
He’s all over this place.

I got him to move the love seat over here,
to this side of the porch so we could sit
in the sun and watch the ocean.

Look at this! How did we collect so many binoculars?

Those wires and power poles used to bother me.
But if you look across the Juan de Fuca to the Olympic mountains,
the wires disappear, and everything becomes clear.

We liked watching the storms come in too,
even when it knocked out our power.
Of course Rod was good with generators and everything like that.

It gets so warm here we’d fall asleep.
I nodded off the other day, just a little, you how you do?
half awake, I reached out and held his hand—for real.

Yesterday, I went to his model train room
to look for him; but it was locked up and I couldn’t find the key.
I thought, well, that’s interesting.

You know I miss him so much.
He was the best husband.
He was the one that said I should start publishing my poems.

Before we go out to the little mound, near the burning pile,
we see an eagle land on the crown of a hemlock,
all grace, like an act of creation.

I put him here, between these three trees overlooking the garden;
two old Douglas fir, and this young one.

What do you think, is it a good place?
Do you think he likes it here?
I say I think he likes it here.

 

Burning pile   –Wendy Morton

I carry the windsplit branches
of hemlock, balsam, fir;
their filigree of lichen, pitch.
Add blackberry vines and
the heirloom rose that no longer blooms.

Later, I bring paper sunflowers,
full of dust and secrets, old
foolish journals, outdated receipts.

It’s not the memories that will burn here;
but last year’s grief,
all smoke, then ash.

This shadow image of Rod Punnett graces the cover of Wendy’s third book of poetry, Shadowcatcher, Ekstasis Editions, 2005.

 

Deep calls to deep
at the thunder of your torrents;
all your waves and your billows
have gone over me.  -Psalm 43

They look silver, those birds, that fly over the Bow River,
the way that cliff of cloud traps the liquid light of dawn,
to bless the wings
of what I see now are common terns.

Later, crossing the pitted parking lot outside a strip mall:
“Look, Mummy, that stone, it’s so wonderful!”
The mother hesitates, tugs the tiny hand, then stops,
squats down, “I didn’t notice, Vanessa, it is wonderful!”

“Hear this, O Job, stop and consider
the wondrous works of God.”

Hear this, I say to my soul, disrobe your ego,
unlock your light, free the newborn heart
of your unseparated self, emerging
in unity with the terns and the rocks
and the pitiless parking lot,
and the losers of history,
and the suffering of the innocent—awake,
under the dark night of amazement.

And the hours, detrivialized,
the grief of a neighbour, realized,
our earth in its agony, clearly perceived,
our tribal rends, the sickening wars,
the genocidal horror across the water,
will cause a physical retching, an emptying-suffering.

This is a sign of our healing—a thickening
of compassion; and every injustice
evoking our cries of resistance.

 

 

One evening, on a trail above the Chickakoo lakes,
we heard Amazing Grace played on bagpipes,
coming across the wide valley and over the waters.
It was like the scent from water lilies filtering up
through high-bush cranberries, or like the shape of a soul,
if you could see a soul, or like when a door opens
to the light of day, and for a moment you are blinded,
and all you can do is swim in the shine of it.
And as the last note drifted up and away,
I was aware that I was leaning against a poplar tree,
my legs shaky, under the weight of all that love.

And now I am old, like a child tottering through very tall grass.
Its green is beginning to drain and I smell the colours of rust.
The ripening heads are over my head. They sway and shatter.
The grass stings my face in the wind. I receive a light flaying
—a final anointing.

I am alone but unafraid. And unafraid, I’m never alone.
I hunger. I’m a disciple. I eat grain. The grain of life.
I thirst. It rains. I rest.

You can walk or leap. It matters not.
You can sing or scream. It’s all the same.
Your inside is outside and your out is within.
You are poured out everywhere.
Your everywhere is a prayer, your prayer is love.