as any dust.
But no.
What escaped
the flames
is pure essence.
What was earth
has been
made earth
easily, and is
so easily
joined
to earth.
We are
Let’s dirty our hands
with rich earth
just as he did—
moving it each day
until he had formed its rich darkness
into what he envisioned—
its residue
lying thick on the surface
of his skin.
He dreamt of it
the same way mystic solitaries do
in far off cliffs and valleys.
He stared into the void and saw
what we could do with earth—
commanding it into
high dikes and dams,
into deep-ditched roads and trenches.
Let’s each of us step forward
and let fall onto the orca blackness
of his marble urn
what he not only held dear
but was.
It is what we are as well—
we who stand here now.
And in moments—
in mere minutes,
a held and exhaled breath—
we too
will lie like him,
our bodies the same consistency
as what we release
through our fingers.
He knew and lived into
this sober reality.
We are what
we’ll all become. We are earth.
We are what we hold
and let go.
We are this richness
that falls from us
so easily we almost
don’t miss it
after it’s gone.
Sept 18
This Boy
for Max Strobel
This boy
pours the last of the dirt in—
heavy chunks
of thick Red River earth.
He tips the blanket
and lets the last of it fall
into the deep square hole.
And, like the expert he is,
this boy
packs the dirt firm.
It’s not learned—
this ability to
knead earth
solid as cement.
It’s instinct.
It’s something this boy does
because it courses in his
blood. And what
he leaves
is not
as we would expect.
It is not
a mounded burrow or
a burp in the grass.
Instead, it is leveled,
the square of sod
placed back into the depression
from which it was cut
just this morning.
This boy
knows the earth
and its ways.
He knows how it is
and how it takes
and gives
just this way.
Sept 18
Others
You will find comfort
on that distant day
when this happens to you
in the warm embrace
of the one who loves you
with chosen love—
with love that came upon you
years ago, sudden as a death
in the early morning
or as gradually
as the season changed.
You will find consolation—
there in that warm
encircling place of flesh and blood
in a place that eases
this pain, reducing it
to an awful aching.
This easing eludes me
who stands alongside a wind-swept road
watching your car turn
and glide past,
disappearing into a horizon
I cannot follow.
I never told you
how I wanted to follow you there,
how I longed for you to take me with you
away from the small mound of earth
behind me
and all that it
holds within it.
I watch you go
to that embrace
and to that love that dances
back and forth between you
and that one you love
as it always has
and always should.
I turn back
to the wind
and the light that falls
through the trees
onto the grass
over the grave
in which my ashes
will also one day lie.
There I find
promised to me
an embrace from which
I will never be released
except when the earth opens
at the first celestial sound
and all the secrets that went down into it
are revealed in all their glory.
Sept 19
That Word
(Anna Akhmatova)
We are unable to say that word, Goodbye.
So, we wander about, your shoulder to mine.
Look how the sun has escaped us. It has fled from our presence
and left us with some strange perpetual dusk.
You are moody and more sullen than this day
as I stand here beside you like your shadow.
We step inside the church. There, we watch
the careful choreography of baptisms with salt,
weddings with holy water, a Requiem mass with
unbleached candles and a pall more purple than a bruise.
Why, we wonder, are we so different than everyone else?
Why do we float around, distant and ephemeral?
Outside, after the funeral, we look away from each other,
unable to let our eyes meet.
Sitting in the churchyard,
we sigh to each other.
With a stick, you trace in the mud of the small, freshly-turned grave
the floorplan of a mansion you dreamed we would live in together
but never will.
Sept 20
These Men
All the men of this family
die the same way.
After years of heavy labor
they take to their beds
in their exhaustion
and never rise again
from that grasping last sleep.
In that endless night
their arteries tighten and close up.
The pulse slows and stops.
In that dawnless time
their hearts malfunction
like clogged carberators
shutting down.
For others, labor was a curse.
But for these men
they frowned every time
they heard the pastor speak of Adam
being cursed to work the earth.
Is it a curse? they wondered
Or is it grace
to rise early in the morning
and to go to the earth
to work? It was benediction.
What they brought home on their hands—
those deep-creased fingers
stained with crude oil
and petroleum grease
and dirt—
was unction.
It was the chrism they
anointed themselves—
and us—
with.
Sept 22
Resurrection
(Yehuda Amachai)
1.
In long hot summer nights
we sleep lightly.
Our bed lies here
on the edge of a great expanse.
All day I walk about
reciting the Angelus with chapped lips,
repeating it to myself like the lyrics
of a song from my youth.
Touch me. Touch me here.
Feel that scar.
It’s not a scar, though.
It a rolled-up letter,
folded in fourths and then in half
and rolled together
here on my chest.
It was written by my father,
who wrote, “He is so good,
this son of mine.
He is so full of love.”
My father used to awaken me
from my afternoon nap
just by quietly shuffling into the room.
I would awaken to that sound—
that gentle, quiet sound of my giant father—
and was grateful that he did so.
Because he did that
I love him even more.
And because he did it, I hope
that he will awakened as well
just as gently and loved as much I was
on that glorious day of resurrection.
2.
I believe—
without a single doubt—
in resurrection.
After all, we too look for any excuse
to return to those places we love most.
When we leave that sacred ground,
we always leave behind something—
a book, a glove, a photo,
just so we have the excuse
to return.
The dead also do just that. They leave
us who survive them behind.
And in just that same way,
they return to claim us.
Once, in some bright autumn
years ago, my father and I visited
a cemetery abandoned by everyone
but the dead. The caretaker
knew crops and seasons
but he knew nothing of those
buried in the ground he tended.
All he could say to my father and me
when we asked about those bones
buried there was:
Every night—
without fail—
they are getting ready,
these dead.
They are getting themselves
ready—
down there, in the ground—
for the resurrection.
3. A fragment
Even death
will not separate us.
Rather it will bind us
together, in some glorious other-place,
in a coming-together
that will never end.
Sept 25
The Gathering
The ghosts of the trees he felled
gather here
at this place we set him,
their shadows swaying and leaning
toward this footspace of earth,
blotting its details in the grass,
its earthen lines,
still fresh and disturbed
as a not-yet healed surgical scar.
You stand with them—
you who never toppled a tree
nor even stripped bark from
those sentries who stand guard here.
How like them you are
in this cold, late
afternoon moment.
How tall you stand—
how straight and firm.
Oct 1
Wire
The wire
tightens. Feel
it. It
binds
and winds
and coils
and turns
into itself,
tighter
and tighter
within. Feel
it burn
and close
into itself.
This is how
it is—
this whole matter
of grief.
I cry out
and still
it tightens,
gripping
and gnawing.
When will it
end? When will
it loosen?
within me
and relieve me
of this
clutching—
this twisting fate
that turns
and burns
and spirals
within me?
Undo this—
unravel
the tightened
layers. Let
me turn
now
in the opposite
direction.
And when
it can’t hurt
more—
then
only then—
it releases.
It slowly
unwinds—
that wire
uncoiling
and unreeling
and loosening
deep in
that agonizing place
within me.
Oct 10
II. Requiem
for my father
Albert Parsley
(Jan 17, 1934-Sept 14, 2010)
and my brother
Jeffrey “J.D.” Gould
(June 13, 1956 – July 29, 2013)
“where sorrow and pain are no more . . .”
—The Book of Common Prayer
Vigil and Absolution
1.
We receive these ashes
with a faith that wanes and flares at times,
but never fizzles or dies.
We receive them
and hope that
somehow
what lies before us—
sifted into the drain hole
on the felt-lined underside of the urn—
will one day
in fact
be raised to a perfection
we can fathom
only in those agonized moments
before we rise from
the hard, suckling hold of sleep.
2.
The dawn—
fragile as ancient bone—
rises through the window
behind his pall-draped urn.
I have kept this vigil
with him
in ways I couldn’t that early morning
when he laid alone
in his last place.
Now, we have this moment—
he and I—
he,
or his ashes anyway,
bedecked with ikons
and his arrowhead tie clip,
and I—
cold and lean and gasping for air
as though it were precious gold—
gold as the dusk is turning
on this golden day
as it falls—
precious and temporary—
through our fingers.
The Preparation
I have perfected mourning.
I have fine-tuned
this art of remembrance—
of reciting each name
on each death-date. I am, after all,
a proud priest-member of
a Guild of such things.
I conjecture often—
privately and homiletically—
about such mysteries as purgatory
and ghosts.
My training allows me
the right to mourn
especially those I have no right
to mourn—
to mourn those who
are mourned no longer,
whose memories have faded
into a dusk of obscurity
like the dreams we dreamed
only last night and can only now
barely remember.
I can mourn those who
are as gray and faded
as images in photographs.