I shook off dying
and was left undying,
but how was it other
than what I already was?
Tag Archives: life
Ode to Willy Loman
Oh, we’ll fix the car and the shower –
the car that lurches, the shower that leaks –
and clean up the piles
of crap we don’t need.
And I’ll remember my wallet
before I bike to the station,
and my hat won’t be lost
for the twenty-third time.
But and yet still
thy will
won’t be in any of it
(or will) as trains pass
and doors close
and faces watch
the city aglow.
Poster with clouds
Cirrus, stratus,
stratocumulus –
these free shapers of sky and our thoughts
have landed to serve as an internal forum
for student affairs.
Knowing the secrets,
and having weighed the arguments,
they speak their mind and send the young,
chastened but buoyed,
on their way
Deeper mysteries of a later age
Whys sunk to why at all
decomposed as quickly
as skybound life
rose from the rotting
Last day
She held him, not trusting him to find the chair.
“We’re family,” she said. “Like family.
You don’t remember?”
He shook his head.
“You’ve come to our house for thirty years.”
He shrugged sorry.
“I have to go with him.”
He knew him, but not his name.
And later, after the coffee, he went.
For when he was young he could go where he liked.
But now was time for where he’d rather not go.
R.I.P. Fr. Piet van der Pol S.S.S. (D. 19 February 2017).
Your granddaughter, your namesake
You were in your last days
and you’d open your eyes
and say you were tired.
We said, Sleep, and
We’re going for a walk.
I didn’t like that it was wet in the woods,
but there were acorns,
and that, she said, was what you did together –
make dolls of them, and sew.
Once she made pants. When she
thought she was, she said, I’m done,
but you said no.
You pulled stitches and fixed the seam.
You wouldn’t stop till you got it right.
Which is what you’re doing now, she said:
piecing the past and pulling tight the seam.
Beatitude
I thought I was supposed to
do something big,
but it kept never happening
and I felt really small.
My heart became a sad, little
shrinking thing, and if you took me
whole and entire, I’d have fit through
the hole of a salt shaker.
The crystals were like boulders to me.
The worst of it was
I knew it was good to be little
and so I felt I
had no right to be sad.
I was selling the message of
poor in the Spirit, and believed it too,
so why was I sad? I knew big
would do nothing for me.
Thank God I wasn’t always sad.
Joy stole up like a teasing child.
Play a game. Look at my kaleidoscope.
I didn’t have the heart to shoo her away.
All she had to do was move a single cloud
and the whole world looked different.
When she left, though, to play with her ocean,
I’d put all the clouds back in place.
And it stayed that way, my face
fixed in a wrinkle, and it
stayed that way
until one day I saw
what the problem was.
I was trying to be big by being
a prophet of the little,
but forgot to be, really be, little,
a man at home in his own wooly heart,
working in sleet and sun and stain,
ready to live life alive again.
A man in a hat. A man with a rake.
A man whom happiness would not forsake
at the drop of a hat.
So now I’m off to do that job –
to work for free in God’s own yard.
God will rain and God will blow,
and I’ll rake His leaves and shovel His snow.
And smile as I do, for the little I know.
Something else
So it wasn’t death, deathless bird,
weeks later hopping in our yard.
It was a condition of which I’d never heard:
a bird’s days wingless and catless.
Love, or Why do we cup to keep what never runs out?
If it should flow through us like water
(it does),
wetting every cell as it goes,
why not ride this living means to be boundless,
and say goodbye to our hard little pool?
How in heaven the old
How in heaven the old appears first
for the sake of recognition –
your gaunt frame and thinning hair,
the soft blue veins on the back of your hand.
We’ll need to be sure.
We’ll have to hear the little cough in your throat first,
before we’ll know we’re there.
