Ghost Shadow

My boy Pup, at the river

You pad

soft and silent

through my dreams.

Your spirit comes

to me,

some mornings,

and you

rest your nose

on the side

of my bed,

and whuff,

as you used to do,

to wake me,

all the mornings

of your life.

Your absence

is a Presence

in my every

waking hour.

Your footsteps

will walk

forever

in my heart.

Heaven's Coast

I have just finished reading - for the second time - Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast, the story of his life with his partner Wally through the time he was dying of AIDS. Mark is a well-known poet on  the USA's eastern seaboard, and his memoir of this period of his life is lyrically written. The New York Times called it "a terrifying and elegant book", and it was worth a re-read to me, when I remembered what an elegy it is, with its understanding of grief, conscious living and conscious dying.

I don't think I have read a better perspective on these topics, and I have done a lot of reading. I thought I'd blog some of the passages I found especially meaningful, for a friend who is going through a difficult passage right now, in the hopes of shedding some light and some hope, and the support of knowing these are passages we all, inevitably, go through in our lives. Here's Mark, beginning in the afternoon and evening hours when his lover is dying :

All that afternoon he looks out at us......I know he sees and registers; I know that he's loving us actively; if I know nothing else about this man, after nearly thirteen years, I know that......I sit there myself all afternoon, the lamps on, since the house is circled in snow and early winter darkness. The afternoon's so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, like a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes.

There is an inaudible roaring, a rush beneath the surface of things, beneath the surface of Wally, who has now almost no surface-- as if I could see into him, into the great, hurrying current, that energy, that forward motion that is life going on.

I was never this close to anyone in my life. His living's so deep and absolute that it pulls me close to that interior current, so far inside his life. And my own. I know I am going to be more afraid than I have ever been, but right now I am not afraid. I am face to face with the deepest movement in the world, the point of my love's deepest reality--where he is most himself, even if that self empties out into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents.

God moving on the face of the waters.

I say to Wally, while the breath comes more shallowly, All the love in the world goes with you.

.......I don't know what it might have been like for me had I not been present at the moment when Wally died, if I hadn't been there to know that enormous intimacy, that sense of brightness in the depths of the dark, an atmosphere so charged it seemed almost to sing. What if I hadn't felt the movement of energy , the leap of spirit lifting from him?

The price we pay for keeping death at such a distance from ourselves is a great one; holding it so far from us, we cannot see its shine.

{Speaking about the moments when his memories, or something he sees, reminds him of those he has lost, he writes:}

We couldn't keep the dead out of the present if we wanted to. They're nowhere to be found, and firmly here, now. While this is a source of pain, memory's double-edged sword at once wounds and offers us company, interior companionship which enriches and deepens the dimensions of every day.

.....When the world shatters, what does a writer do?.....Always, always, we were becoming a story. But I didn't understand that fusing myself to the narrative, giving myself to the story's life, would be what would allow me to live.

Heaven

Ongoingness, vanishing: the world's twin poles.

Each thing disappears; everything goes on.

The parts pour into nowhere, the whole continues.

And to be nowhere is to be in heaven, isn't it,

in the boundless, loose from

the limits of time and space?

Isn't the whole world

heaven's coast?

....all along I've been this, have been part of this great intimacy and light, that immense kindness that was holding me, supporting me, but I hadn't been able to let myself know it. And I'm laughing and weeping at the idea......how much love there's been in my life, how much suffering....how we didn't know who we were, through the pain, that even that was a part of God.

........A week and a few days after Wally's death, I took the dogs to walk at Hatch's Harbor, along the long dike that leads across the salt marsh out toward the lighthouse and the far point.

[He describes walking under storm clouds, where one spot, and only one spot, was radiant with golden sunlight, alluring, as he walks towards it.]

.....I'd been walking with my head down, crying, feeling my way through my shaky memory of [a Whitman] poem......I was putting one foot in front of the other, not looking up...and I came to the ....lines I had been traveling toward as surely as I had been walking here, to the end of the dike just below the high-washed dunes began.

"All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what anyone supposed,

and luckier."

And then I looked up, into the face of a coyote.

He was standing only a little ways from the dike, perfectly still, eyeing us with a calm and frank curiosity, and he was uterly beautiful--big, full-bodied, not the scrawny creature of the night supposed to haunt local garbage cans.......but thick-furred, gleaming, the tips of each gray and blonde hair dipped in sunlight. His eyes were golden, magnetic, inescapable. There was a moment when we all stopped - the dogs, the coyote, myself - and the world seemed in absolute suspension, nothing moving anywhere, everything centered around the fixity of our mutual gaze.

I thought, It's a wolf, a timber wolf, and then thought no .... it's one in the afternoon on Cape Cod and I'm staring at a coyote.

Then from nowhere I thought, He's been with Wally, he's come  from Wally. I knew it as surely as I knew the lines of the poem. This apparition, my - ghost, was it? spirit animal? real creature carrying the presence of my love?  Perhaps it doesn't matter. I've never seen one before or since, and never been so frankly studied from the other side of wildness, from a world I cannot enter....the coyote stared back at us, and I could imagine in that gaze Wally's look back toward home--his old home--from the other world: not sad, exactly, but neutral, loving, curious, accepting. The dead regard us, I think, as animals do, and perhaps that is part of their relationship: they want nothing from us; they are pure presence, they look back to us from a world we can't begin to comprehend. I am going on, the gaze said, in a life apart from yours, a good life, a wild life, unbounded.

The coyote was, for me a blessing: different from what anyone supposed, and luckier. That night my friend Mekeel would dream of a coyote wandering the rooms of her house, a powerful and sleek animal who had come to bring her a single word: safe. In the weeks and months after, in the stunned absence, in the hopeless hours, in the immobilized ache those are the words I'd reach for: lucky, safe. I think it was this visitation, this story, that most sustained me. The story itself, the image.....the potent presence and consolation of the animal body, the gaze across the gulf of otherness. To those eyes I would return, over and over: different, and luckier.

...I turned to look at the dogs--both of them poised, perfectly still--and turned back just in time to see the coyote loping away, though at a little distance he was suddenly gone......vanished.

......And I'm suddenly stumbling ahead, toward the stripe of sunlight that remains, gilding the dune between us and the sea......When the snow starts,will my coyote be out there someplace, leaping, nipping at the spinning flakes? Or is he not of this world at all, but a creature of the spirit's coast, passing back and forth between elements and worlds--messenger, emblem, reminder? Wherever he is, he's gone, and the dogs and I have turned up the slope of dune which will lead us to the sea.

We have walked into that golden band of light I've been watching. A wild and bracing wind is blowing off the Atlantic, and suddenly the biting air's alive with big white flakes swirling in a shock of sunlight, and I'm alive with a strange kind of joy, stumbling up the dune into the winter wind, my face full of salt-spray and snow.

Fire

[image from firewebdesigns.com]

He burnt down

her store,

her home by the sea,

and destroyed

her life,

and her dream.

Starting over

with nothing,

she rebuilt her life

from scratch.

A Talmud Angel

[image from Flickr.com]

"Every blade of grass has its Angel
that bends over it and whispers....
'grow,grow'."
The Talmud

[I penned this poem for a dear friend who is walking through the kind of days where the spirit grows faint at the prospect of putting one foot in front of the other. Days when life is pain and the heart grows weary. I post it here to encourage any of you who are experiencing dark days right now. In the midst of the fuss and frenzy of the holidays,  it can sometimes look like most people have privileged and easy and happy lives,(they don't; no one is immune from trouble and sadness). All the hoopla can make one's own circumstances seem harder to bear. This is to remind us all that the new year will dawn, and spring will come again. Flowers will bloom, sunshine will bless us all, and a happier day will dawn for one and all. That is my wish for 2011. Let us all continue to  Live In Hope!]

How do you
keep hope alive
in times when
the March wind blows
and hoarfrost forms
around the edges
of your heart?
Times when
the winter wolf
stalks your footsteps
and you doubt the sun
will ever warm
your cheeks again?


Those are the days
when my eyes
seek the first light
of morning,
receiving each day
as a new beginning
with the possibility
of new perceptions;
days when I remember
there is a
larger landscape
than the one we see;
when I know,
if I look out through
my small window,
I may only see gray clouds
over the city.
Yet if I enlarge
that window
and my vision,
I can see the whole sky,
a patch of blue
just breaking
on the horizon.


In those times
when all around me
seems to be
chaotic and dissembling,
I have come
to understand
the universe is
simply rearranging,
through times of transition,
and on the other side
there may be
something wonderful
waiting that
I can't yet see.


I remember
that every cell and seed
in the universe
has one purpose:
to grow.


Even when living
feels too hard,
I still believe in life.
It is the underlying principle
of the universe.
In the midst of war,
political imprisonment, torture
and the worst that humankind
can do to one another,
a human’s instinct
is solely to survive,
to live long enough
to arrive at
a better day.


When your soul is
sorrowing and defeated,
and resists putting
one tired foot
in front of the other,
what I see is
the hugeness
of your spirit
that survived
the trenches
of childhood,
and the heartbreak
of lost love,
to get to this place
where you feel
you are
coming up
empty.


With all of my belief,
in you, in life
and in tomorrow,
(I who have walked
through similar
barren wastelands),
until you can
believe, again,
yourself,
let me be the
Talmud angel
who bends over the
solitary blade of grass
that is your life,
and whispers to it:
“Grow! Grow!”

The Case Against Forgiveness

[Dr. William Petit of Connecticut, his daughters Hayley and Michaela, and his wife Jennifer]

(posted for Poets United Think Tank prompt: forgiveness)

I know all the words about forgiveness. I've done the work, and I can talk the talk. "Holding onto anger and hatred is like drinking poison, and hoping the other guy dies." "We forgive for ourselves, not for the other person." And "Until we forgive, there is no healing."

"Who am I, now?" this good man asks, "now that I am no longer a doctor,

I no longer have a wife, or two daughters, or a home? Who am I now?"

Today I watched a heartbroken man speak of his heartbreak, of the hole in his heart and the hole in his soul caused when two ex-convicts on parole left their halfway house, chose his house at random, beat him unconscious, tied him up,  raped and assaulted and tortured his wife and daughters, then poured gasoline over them and set the house on fire. Still tied up, he  managed to roll himself up the stairs and out the basement door,rolling across the lawn to the neighbours to get his family help, as his house and his family were burning. Help came too late.

"Who am I now?" he asks, "now that  I no longer have my daughters and their future,

which was my future? Who am I now?"

He began a Foundation to do good works in the name of his wife and daughters. "By doing good works, in their honor, I believe goodness will overcome evil," he said. "I have a jagged hole in my heart, a jagged hole in my soul. I don't think it will ever go away. But waves of goodness, when they come, help to smooth the jagged edges a little."

"Who am I now?" he asks, "now that I am no longer a doctor, no longer a husband,

now I no longer have a home,

or a family. Who am I now?"

The interviewer spoke about forgiveness. I knew the question was coming and I rejected it for him. How could he possibly ever forgive such bestial acts? "Do you think you can forgive?" He looked back steadily. "You can forgive someone who slaps you in the face. You can forgive someone who insults you. You can forgive someone who causes an accident. But forgiving the essence of evil is not appropriate. No, I cannot forgive."

He said, and the words rang true and right, that forgiving the essence of evil

is not appropriate,

and thus, he cannot forgive.

If you wish to support the foundation Dr. Petit started in their name, information is available at http://www.petitfamilyfoundation.org/