No use to run to the camera while crimson lights up a cloud bank on the eastern horizon. It never looks right. Maybe, you wonder, with some enhancement, some manipulation of hue and saturation, you could get it there. “Here, look at this one Jim!” And you could learn to live with that. That bit of sweetening for concealment, just this side of consciousness; a good stones throw from being obvious. Like a bit of padding or cinching under your clothes. A minor fudge on your resume. A few seconds of silence that lends credence to your professor’s falsehood. Sooner be accepted under false pretext than live with rejection — we apprentice personal subterfuge. Nothing overt. Just enough camouflage to escape question, just enough rouge to be let into the club. How refreshing then — adulthood. No matter how old. Content to stay in your morning chair and watch the colours run their course without the need for a filter. How healing then, released from the straining tensions of slightly twisted truths, is learning to live with the ongoing and regular disappointments of life.
The aberrations of human behaviour can make us turn away and miss the good. From accountants in Ontario, preparing free tax returns for health workers, to a woman in Iowa sewing masks for her ‘giving tree’ (and yes, all those health care workers), the world is still full of good people.
Early this morning standing in rain: sparrow and junco soaking in song, quail content in blackberry tangle, radiance coming up through wet gravel;
look closer, there’s illumination in the predawn dark; there’s bitterness succumbing to hope; resentment is losing an edge; blue herons are choosing their mates.
Sometimes, coming to your senses, you see it everywhere — the possible, the hate-pulverizing potential of human wonder, the honey-bombs of unregulated charity, whole armies from every country scampering to catch a blitzkrieg of paper hearts in their upturned helmets.
And everywhere neighbours step out, curious to greet the light, and find it emanating from their own heart.
The sun is rising under the buoyancy of human vulnerability — can’t we see how it should be? and isn’t yet. Look closer, there’s light wherever you go.
The other day I was congratulated by LinkedIn (such intimacy) for owning my “business” (Grow Mercy) for 14 years. It’s a nice number. No less employed by the gospeller Matthew for his generational division of history. In any case, every year around Easter (this blog’s birthday) I rethink, and ask if it’s time to return my writing licence, expecting no refund. So far, every year, there’s been something more to say (ironic benefit of a squirrel-like attention span?). This year the something-more-to-say came in the form of a poem (surprise!) inspired by the late Thomas Lux. But it also seemed to give me — when comes the time — an appropriate end piece for this blog. At which time I will repost (I’m sure with edits). But if I forget, or can’t, well then, it’s already here in all its prescient deficiency.
Dear Citizen Reader
Everyday I rise to the work of walking further out than the day before.
For this, I gave up a pension. But would consider it worth the loss if I could meet you.
Everyday I rise and go down to the sea and out to the bridge, the town folk call Grand Fantasy; some call Horizontal Babel; and still others call — having never seen a soul arrive from the other side — Mocking Pier.
Everyday I pack a lunch and walk out on those old boards, raked beneath by gale-crests of waves, splintered by sun and salt, until one day I walk too far to go back and have to spend the night.
I awake to a grey morning and choose — as though there was choice — to go on under the target of time, under the yoke of yearning.
Guided by a sound (I think I hear) from some distant shore, and imitating the faith of those Magi, I risk it all on some remembered arrangement of stars. “Shoot for the moon!” I shout into the fog, and walk.
Now, far from my home in the bay, far from villagers planning a memorial, I walk, mist-blind on slippery wood, stepping over missing rungs, calling on every name I know, praying in symbols, and speaking these few words into the wind.
But it’s not about the words. Not these. Not any. It’s never been about looting silence for a hope chest of glittering verse. It’s always been about the bridge.
Me, hanging on to the cable, straining toward you, hoping for two small things: To connect. To communicate.
deer running through December bringing fawns of April;
my father reading the morning news at some eternal kitchen table;
life regained, your friend’s fine-grained wrist, years-free of fresh infliction;
good riddance to the rotten fruit of desired appearance, at the ripeness of an honest face;
your first time in a movie theatre — believing in every bit of the magic;
power to stay true to the image that first opened your heart — never giving up on your own flourishing;
freedom and light in the laughter of someone else’s happiness;
the secret leaven in your dough: yogurt, lemon and maple syrup for the rising;
a pea-green pond at the heart of a park and a bench built for conversation;
finding a cabin in the trees, look, there’s honey dripping from the ceiling;
a new game: queen of hearts trumps king of diamonds;
that boy across town inviting you over to play — just two days after you helped gang up on him in the schoolyard —
can you ever forget him?
the One who gave you Easter-eyes: awake to your ways in ways you couldn’t have been before.
Remember the storm? Swept up in it. You couldn’t make sense of it.
Killing voices. Like wolves in the hills closing in, like swirls of wind through limbs of cedar, like a mucus-green sky thundering the prairies and towering seas howling over mountains.
And in this pavilion of raging tongues, where we demanded a victim — a Seed of silence, something deathless, a cave pierced by light and full of daffodils.
Then, tempted to turn in disbelief: a spark for the piston of your soul; a song you love at hearing its first chord; that boy that could have been you.
