No Cumber

Who watches us

 

through the Great

Silence just beyond

 

th’eternal vesperal

light. When tired souls

lean ever into the closing

of the day with no

 

hunch about what

that day has meant

or guess toward

the meaning of

the morrow. It is

 

not I - the weary

me that has no stake

or claim to make

in giving life. It is

 

instead the I that

awakens as we lessen

tight our holding grip

on all ruin we believe

ourselves to rule.

 

The One who weaves

destiny and breath

is glad when we ourselves

put ourselves to rest,

bedding down to let

the world align itself anew

 

without so much as a

wit of our cleverness

to run it all aground. That

One rejoices in our

fading of to sleep, perchance

to dream and imagine

that we have nothing to

rule, or grumble at, no

 

cumber to build into

a mess.

Morning Prayer

The cool stillness
of the morning abbey
soaks the prayers into
me as warmth and heat.

There is a pause, here;
there is a pause
between the words,
between the lines
of mourning;
the lines of prayer;
the lines of beseeching.

I used to think the words were the
prayer; today, and perhaps
through all time,
it is the pause.

The Trees Chant

The wind
blows steady
over the surface of
the frozen lake.

From the hills
it carries the sound
of trees chanting
the chants
of the monks
of old.

Gregorian tunes
mingle with the
rattle of leaf on
leaf.

If you hold your
heart still
in the gray morning
hours, even the
cry of the hawk
rises as a prayer

like incense
to the nose of
the ALL-WISE.

An aroma of
piety
and song of
salvation
blows in across
the stillness
of the frozen lake.

Blows in and sets
us free.

Mingled

It is coming up through me
from the ground.
My feet are pulling it
out of the earth -
tearing it
from the dirt.

It is dark,
silvery,
heavy and full
of power.

My heart beats with it
these days.
It courses through
all my veins -
ivory growing from bone
and iron deposits in the
hot and cooling core.
It bubbles.

There is no joy
in this grief
that comes from
the dirt,
that comes from
the ground
and from death.
There is rest
sometimes,
but there is no joy.

It mingles with me
and falls down again.
Trying to pull me
back in to its depths.
I pull to keep myself
from going in,
from going under.

My pulling
and its
pulling get
lost and mixed
together and
unclear. Who is
pulling which and
which whom?

Traces of silvery pools
mix with blood and seep
into the crevices of
the cracked dirt.
No tree will grow here,
no blade of grass.
Only the buzzards
will come
and peck at the soil;
tasting for death
between the broken
earth and the pieces
of bloodied gravel.

Ciao!

+Tom

A Thousand Years of Staring

The smell of wood
burning in the fireplace
dances in the air
mixing with the
sound of the river.

Today, I am sure
we learned about motion
by watching the water.

Thousands of years of staring,
daily staring,
heavy staring,
into the flowing
wetness –

driven moisture –

made them sure they
could float a log
or turn a wheel.

I have come here for
the sound of her movement,
for the peace of
her traveling – to hide from
Zoe’s death.

The geese come here.
They move at sunset..
as the glow disappears,
a chorus swells.

One goose
carries the point of
the song;
pounding home the call
to make music.
“Sing. Sing,” she calls.
And, they do.

A lovely song.
It grows and deepens
as they approach.
And, as they are overhead,
I close my eyes, and
with Rumi, I raise my
hand and drink in
the secret nectar.

I dance.
Twirl,
pause,
slide, whirl.
I have come here
for the geese.

I have come here
for them to sing
the song for me.
This past week
our little girl died.

Zoe Alexander,
laden with cysts on
her head and spine,
died inside her mother.

We saw her on the
screen. Little hands and feet.
A chord, and cysts. Before
they could take her from us,
she died.

I came to the river to
stare. My numbness screams
out to listen. I came here to
hear the geese. Here
there are no words of consolation,
no words of hope; but,
the pounding of the silence
and the movement.

I came to the river
That the one goose might carry
The point of the song for me.
For now, I must stare, and feel
the pounding rhythm of darkling flow
within my arches, within my chest.

Ciao,

+Tom

Tear Clouds

The clouds held rain

like our tears -
heavy beyond holding.
For days they spilled
out of our eyes,
over our lids,
down our cheeks
in unending streams of warmth.

O God,
how,
even when we had stopped
crying, how they did run
out, slopping over the sides
of our bucketed hearts.
Never-ending.

I cannot
form the questions.

The mind has ceased
and the heart has
joined forces with
the body.

The mind’s grief is confusion.

Its grief is not the grief of
the rest of the body -
those wrenching, twisted
knotted aches.

It is more
a still grief. Unsure and childish.

The body mourns and mourns
and mourns, becoming empty
and endlessly full,
changing the course
of life -

Never to be the same again.

The mind grieves confusion.

The heart holds hands with the
body and pours out its grief
onto the rutted
earth that is grooved
by the soul of time forever.

Weather changing deeply,
clouds moving endlessly to the
rhythm of drenching and drying;
digging trenches in soft feeling
that screams in pain.

Ciao!

+Tom

The Other Side

There is another side
to every snowbank.
The place the wind
could not touch,
did not reach and
pile snow in
random patterns of cold.

It is quiet there.
There is little noise
and the muffled
stillness sings warmly
to the heart.

There is an underside
to the surface of the lake -
to the surface of the pond.
The duck and goose
paddle under all that come
from above

paddle it down to
that place on the
water's bottom where

there is little noise
and the muffled
stillness sing darkly
to the heart.

This inward thing -
this other side to
the snowbank,
this underside of
the surface of
things

this is a place
so close that it
is far, far away.

Our heart is
just below the
skin,
just below the
bone,
but it takes
a journey to
Byzantium to unlock
the final membrane
of remembrance.

It is that other side,
it is that under side
where all the empty
fullness dances and swirls
like a flake in a
whirlwind
and a speck on the
current.

A sparrow flits
and breaks the concentration,
an acorn falls
and the attention
is brought back
to now. And the stillness
awaits a traveler from
another day.

Emptiness

There is an emptiness in me
that cannot form words

or even hear them.

A crack in the macadam
with not even a weed -
unwanted thing -
poking through to the sun.

It may be because our
child is now dead;

or because this is the
time in the mottled and damp
green-brown world
for no stirrings.

Nothing moves but birds
on the top, scouring
the moist earth for worms
to pull up from the dirt.

Scabs from the skin.

Pre-spring death just hangs
dank,

blends with silhouettes
and with the ground
and just stays there.

Slowly. Slowly the birds
will bring back the daffodil’s
yellow, the tulip’s red, and
the skies lion blue.

Slowly
the crocus will push up,
burst and fade to milky
white. When this has come,
perhaps by then, words
will return. Words that feel
as if they have meaning.

Elixir

I know what the silver
elixir was.

The drink I stole and
consumed to slake
my thirst.

It was grief;
and O how it
burned out my soul
and ran through my body,
out of my toes,
onto my sandals.

It came to me
A week ago in a dream
posing as a drink
I was told I should not
drink.

O mercurial elixir,
O burning change.

I know what the silver elixir was.
It was Zoe and the alchemy of
hellish change that has begun.

In the Waiting

In the waiting
when the mouth can only
open to the throat
and croak curses -

the heart prays in silence.

Her frail thin,
dandelion-stem limbs
turn and pull.

Clutching her head
she wriggles, trapped
in the tunnel of my
wife’s flesh,

unable to know
the mass hanging
on her skull
keeping her a freak on
her way to choking.

What will be?

One Second

It only takes one second
for the soul to leave the body.

A flicker on the screen,
a tightening of the face
and it drains right out.

From the head-
through the heart-
out of the feet-
onto the highly polished
gray flecked white
linoleum floor.

The pathways of ecstasy
become vacant,

the heart becomes hollow,
and the mind numbed
becomes one-pointedly empty.

Gone; hope,
joy, elation.

It only takes one second
for the soul to leave the body.

Into the Earth

Snow melts
into the earth,

and dirt swells
gladly

holding it
for the sun’s passing.

Drinking from
these

fresh streams

can only come
by dying.

As Humans Grieve - for Robert Bly

I did not know
what he meant
when he said,
“he has not grieved
as humans grieve.”


But now, I feel
his meaning all throughout me,
all over the place.

Grief has a cadence;
a beating of the wing
with honk,
as the flock moves,

slowly,

a line in the distance,

over the nearby pond.

This character that grieves,
This one inside, he has
his back against the
Stucco wall and his ass
is seated on the marble bench.

The brown leaves blow loudly
about his feet, in the crow-cold
winds and purpling-gray skies.

Only just now has he learned
he will not fall forever into
the pit at his side.

The walls of the pit
fly by him - up, always up -
he grieves.

This one inside has only
Just begun to grieve. In his
Beginning he grieves like
an animal. A howling dog.

Twisting, twirling,
Unleashed, undone
he has no other
place to go but to the den
of tears and ash,
of sweat and blood, down,
down, down
at the bottom of the pit.

In his howling and falling he changes.
Passing through silence into anguish
He emerges someone new.

He is a man now. He has recovered
a bit from the tortured side. He has some
silence in the night. He has some loss.

His eyes, sore from
sobbing, are covered by dark glasses;
his appearance is disheveled and unkempt.

But he sits there, on his bench.
An animal, become a man.

He is different. But he does not say
wiser. He does not believe, anymore,
that the answer is in his hand, or in his
reach, or even out there - at all. He knows
it is a matter of time before the bench
slides over, and again he falls into the pit, and
again he becomes an animal. A man no more.

For now,
until then,
he is a god.
Gods sit in silence,
on their benches,
and they wait.
Gods are what
we are when
we are not animals.
Gods feel and know
something about
the crazy cycles
that keep pushing us
to the edge and
over the edge.

He sits there,
on his ass,
with his sore eyes,
and is a god. For just
a little bit. A god who
wept there, in confusion -
somewhere between
compost and glory.

That is how
a human grieves.

Daffodils

If there must be 

pain in our lives,

let it be amid the
delicate, and tender,

yellow folds
of flower flesh 

of spring.

 
Let it be amid
the smell of beauty

and the sight of
new sprung

blossoms.

A Man's Grief

A man’s grief is
somehow different.
It starts from separation.

He is not the same as
all other things. He really
does not feel like an ocean
or a great body of water.

There is a difference.

He is not the same as the
mother who gave
him all that he became. From
the start he knows he is the
OTHER.

He is not the same
as all other things. This makes
a man stand one step back.
This is his grieving. Not as close
to it, to anything, as he
might imagine he could be.

There is a hole in him,
in man. It is there to
mimic the womb. But it
is bottomless.

This hole drops endlessly down.
A man falls into this hole – this
hole of his - at some point.

When he is
not really looking.

Maybe he can fill the hole,
by screwing everything
in sight, by taking control
over all that he can touch.
Maybe if he fills other things
with himself, he will somehow
fill the emptiness of the hole.

Standing,
one step back,
he can only approach
the edge
so far.

There he stands,
feet firmly planted on the
ground, staring into the sea.

The endless sea.

Grieving.

And that day
is the day the hole is filled
the day that he is
able to move forward.

And,
stand apart no more.

Gathering

I have been away for a while;
out gathering in the fields.
I have pulled up lots of good
stuff, by the roots, and have
put them in my basket over
my shoulder - the basket at my side.

I have been away from myself
collecting new foods, new stuff for
the journey. Having just gotten
back, I now know I was gone.

I am happy to be back, because now
I can begin again to bake the bread,
and light the candles, to drawl the
bath and to work the poems, to be
about the things I laid aside so I
could gather new foods; bring in new
stuff. This feeling is as refreshing and
surrounding as the two feet of snow,
drifting this way and that outside of
my home, outside of me.

Zoe

That she was born to us in
mottled hues is known.
We did not want to have
her sucked out of the womb
into disparate death. But, the
cry came over the mountain,
and it spoke of war and bloodshed.

We had set ourselves to killing
God. We wanted to route Him out;
for, He had shammed us; toyed with
all that we had done that had been
good. We fought Him hard. But He
was everywhere and we lost strength.

The tolls could not be
measured accurately.
How much damage
had we done? How many
limbs had He lost?
Mist settled into our days
and the battling ceased
to the haunting sound of
the loons on the water.

We had only one casualty.
When she left, she took our
souls. She held them like
parcels, or books under
her arms as she swam in
the vast and forever blue sea.

She has sent back pieces of
them. For us. She pulls off
something from here, something
from there, and floats it in on
the surface of the cold
churning waves. It will come
in as a petal, or a moss. It
will come in as a tear, or the
sound of the pipes over the
Highlands.

Was there not some deep
settling as I crossed the path
exposed by the tide, to touch the
heather at the castle ruin. Was there
not a settling of green, and brown, and
purple bells. A settling of pounding
waves and cool mist breezes.

She has not left us. Yet,
she has left us. And, there is
the heather. There is the heather.