Poem Poem

Sandwiched between Taxi and Happy Days

We watched the bodies being dragged away

Florid and flaccid in easy chairs

Ex-flower-children grow middle-aged stares

We weren’t really peaceniks they’re now quick to declare

We’ve finally learned we can’t help over there

It’s so easy to turn off the tube

And they only have faces on the six o’clock news.

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Don’t miss the latest news
Entreaties
Entrapments
And I shall stock my designs
Creating opportunities
For surviving
I shall run from advice
And keep silent
Keeping my life in balance
It’s a new day
I eat my words only
 

And so the silence
in which I live
brings home again
how expendable I am to the world.

I wish I had a piano
I could remember myself on.
I wish I had an ocean
I could be swallowed up in.
I wish I could put myself in a bottle,
out of time.
Throw myself back into history.
I wish I could find my way
out of the mystic.

In the hush of my house,
mind shouts.
Even the microseconds between thoughts
make no sense.
Nothing I can divine
in the tangled mess of it all
adds up to coherent discourse.
Like being stoned on emptiness.
A rush to fill in the unavoidable abyss.
Arms plastered to my sides.
Only fingers free to type.
Can’t reach out or hold on to anything.
Only the keys and space bar
anchor me
to the here and now.
Anchored on a space bar.
Good luck with that.

Stoned but far from high.
A whooshy, wooly weariness
sucking up the seconds.

And here. I. Am.

I will crawl out of this.
This thing I know so well.
This madness that precedes enlightenment.

Wait it out.
Or shock myself back
doing something
as banal as sweeping the floors.

Invoke shamanic spirits
to pull soul back into body,
out of extreme awareness,
to the safely closeted space
of a more common plane.

What secrets would you whisper
sacred spirits?
What gifts can be extracted
from the constant,
echoing rhythm
of a lonely
heart?

 

Ours was an odd,
close estrangement.
Fifty years you
Occupied spaces
Only you could fill
in my life.

Spaces
In my lust
In my dreams
In my hopes
In my heart
In my fabrications
In my denials

Spaces
In my joy
In my tenderness
In my puzzlement
In my persistence
In my loyalty
In my betrayal

Spaces
In my ignorance
In my sorrow
In my anger
In my silence
In my distancing
In my acceptance

Spaces
In my thoughts
In my poetry
In my songs
In my friendship
In my love
In our children

I mourn you,
As is fitting,
As the only mate
I ever had.


 

I have escaped to the jetty in Lachine,
adrift.
Daniel is dying
excruciatingly slowly
in a gentle, but foreign place
somewhere in Pointe-Claire.

I take stock of my life, as one does,
there lie echoes of insult, of injury,
a long necklace of broken pearls
as heavy as my heart.
So often I ran from disappointment,
to chase one more mirage of love,
breathing life back into that comatose dream
That somehow never flowered.
And Daniel, who has known True Love,
is excruciatingly slowly
dying in a place
he never even stood before
and is home just the same
because his Love is there.

And my twin, older sister and I,
who once cut rather handsome figures,
have grown old, pendulous and apart.
We sit a vigil with the youngest girl
and the middlest boy
who together work to keep sacred
the vision of a united clan.
It seems to me a distant fantasy,
an evaporated dream,
a complete fabrication
when we pretend the things it means.
While Daniel,
who stopped pretending long ago,
is very very slowly dying
somewhere in Pointe-Claire
in a house haunted by his living spouse.

I search for a tiny point of power
in this longest of neverending hours:
the hour of Covid,
of crazy climate,
of cars crashed into,
of a home invaded for the sake of profit,
of dangerous clown chiefs next door.
Is there a reckoning? I wonder,
sinking deeper in doubt
as even the most basic power
is shown to be illusory
and as Death
sits by my little brother's bed,
where his siblings cannot.

Oh Daniel is dying
somewhere in Pointe-Claire
and my heart breaks for the woman
he loved above all
and the sons
that he cherished always.
And I celebrate his courage
and his strength
and his sharpness of mind
and his gentleness of heart
and his capacity to take in every detail
to make sense of the puzzles of life
and mostly, maybe more than all that,
his insistence on noble deeds
and honest words.

Daniel is dying
and what is there to do
but hold him close in my heart
while I sit in the town
where his story began
learning to let go
of all that he was.
 

I catch myself
not breathing.
Do you ever
just sit,
as if paralyzed,
even though your limbs
are perfectly able?

I catch myself
not breathing,
reminding myself
I am not dead.
Reminding myself I
can move and do.
Berating myself
I should,
since I can.

If you had my health
and capabilities,
you no doubt
would be out
spreading laughter
and annoyance
in the world.

You would be fixing things
and feasting
and teasing
and drinking
to excess
and loving your people
in your own
sometimes twisted,
sometimes wonderful
ways.

I am not dead,
You are.
What a waste…

 

It hit me again today
that you are nowhere
and that by now,
every last trace of you
will have been erased
from your last home.

How does one measure
the sum total of a life?
Is it by the number
of bodies and hearts
missing your presence?
By the cumulated depths
of our mourning?

Is it by the things
you left behind:
your friends,
our daughters?
The innumerable
pipes, wires, cabinets, roads
you repaired?
The plants and
gardens and
trees you planted?
The paperwork
your birth, being and death
generated?

Or is it the stories
that prove the measure of your
passage as a
mid-twentieth-to-early-twenty-first century man?
Some are kept preciously
In little corners of our minds.
Some are well known.
Others, still secret.
Every now and again,
When the realization recurs,
We unfold them
And read them over
And hold them close to our hearts
Where you yourself
Can no longer be held.