Category Archives: Poetry

RIVER CANTICLE

Old gypsy lady Susquehanna, three hundred million years and counting

Older than that holy Nile or Ganges, earth’s oldest water ever spilling

Daughter to the clouds and rainbows, sister to aged Allegheny mountains

Great artery of this America, fountain to a well of years so near to filling

Time must circle back on itself, though first it seems straight like gravity

In such wise the gypsy speaks deceitful tales when in youth she murmurs

Whispering to the rocks of what will come as fate to every camp and city

Rank histories of war upon its banks, floods of old, unrepented murders,

Knowing what all knowing is, but then at last that viscid surface quickens

Casting off its sullen glaze of lies, deep pendulum of ancient slaughter,

Her measure all at once plunges swifter to the sea, the dull motion lightens

A dead history of meandering turns and shifts to this rush of living water

At Columbia, the river town where the gypsy finds her soul and freedom

Where Wright built his cabin and plied his ferry, he was a gospel pacifist

The Quaker sought a different kind of world, an altogether novel idiom,

Grace not guns, his kind of tongue, a destiny of peace here made manifest

Unseen world’s discovery, the dove’s deep forgiving arc circling to descent

At last, by the side of a dazzled flood in this late age’s lingering afternoon

You feel the river urging, blocked and held but pressing on, never quenched

And yet all made new in a continent sore abused will never come too soon

The Susquehannock lived here and if Iroquois, beaver wars, and flintlocks

Did not finish them smallpox and Sunday Paxton boys surely killed them all

Meanwhile rafts laden with flour and coal flowed downstream to the docks

And lumber piled thick as grass on Front Street, a nation’s baptized capital

For the newly rich, but each the fractious prism of the other, this American

Dream, with other chattels too, African slaves and their traumatized exodus

North, crossing here to yet longer exile, a ghetto space amidst Samaritans

While railroads hammered out the rhythm, the sound of industry, iron angelus

Chorded into music by metal strung guitars, ragtime, jazz, blues, rap and rock

Soul memory of exiles, easing pain where it’s impossible to know the river-bed

Until at last water itself sounds alarm, altering tempo to reveal history’s shock

Against life itself, a Susquehanna effect, changing misery for light that’s shed

Everywhere her voice is raised to tell and any man or woman hears her meaning

This song, they feel it, swelling over every hill and scale, this altered frequency

Incense and lavender, heather and thyme, fields of gold and the last harvest season

O portal of the Jordan, where murder is no more, and all is but grain and mercy

Come, come all, to this unknown west, this undiscovered south, where the leaves

Heal each broken skin of every shade, on trees beside a river flowing from a throne

Abyss of love disappearing and resurfacing ever the same, so no creature grieves

For dead oceans of hatred without cease, there is just the swirl of love to atone

Throw wide the gates to the river city, this final Columbia of all our dreams and history

The water seethes with light, angels and martyrs dance forever among its fiery filaments

Shrapnel metamorphic to compassion, its bitter molecules recoded into tender mystery

Transformation is the face of truth, not two-faced being and a dumb parade of elements

Start in the middle always, nel mezzo del cammin, the thick of life’s most urgent story

Here, here with this, this flowing river, and all its quick, bright, swift, and sudden glory

Heart Attack!

It’s just about a year since a heart-attack knocked me off my CASUAL perch (Carelessly Assured Serenely Uninterrupted Animate Life). A single year, I suppose, is not a whole lot of time for a commemoration, but the fact of my survival, and the alternative, make it seem a whole lot of lifetimes. All those little things that happen in everyday existence, all the hopes and dreams that continue to swirl inside your head and make life so much, well, life, none of that would exist at all for the last year if I had made my exit. How precious then is that space of time, how much worthy of a celebration!

Human body with heart, with aorta ventricle, left atrium, right atrium, superior vena cava, inferior vena cava and artery, on black background.
Human body with heart, with aorta ventricle, left atrium, right atrium, superior vena cava, inferior vena cava and artery

Besides, I also completed my thirty-six sessions of cardiac rehab, becoming part of a select community of similarly aged men, plus (for some reason) a lesser number of women, all recently made conscious of their acute fragility this side of eternity. We had such a huge sense of something in common, as we hit the treadmills and exercise bikes, that we continually talked about going out for beer and pizza together. But when it came to it, we couldn’t bring ourselves. I suspect it would have felt too much like a reunion of ghosts at the local funeral parlor!

So, instead, I will try to celebrate by writing something rising from the experience and I would never have thought of before: a dialogue between a man and his own heart. You see, you never think of your heart as separate from yourself, until gnaws in your chest like a wild dog trying madly to get out. That’s when you realize that the heart is a muscle with a life of its own, and you really have to start paying attention to it.

Oh, my dear heart, what did I ever do to you for you to treat me this way?

You never cared before, you took me entirely for granted!

But how was I to know? You were so quiet and gentle, always there day and night, with your peaceful little beat, you made me take you for granted! How was I to know you could get so angry? pexels-photo-1820510

Give me a break! You were always saying creepy things like “Cross your heart and hope to die!” “Eat your heart out!” “I heart you!” You knew exactly how important I was. But it never occurred to you to figure out what really made me tick? If you had a muscle strain in your leg or arm you would talk about it non-stop. But the most serious muscle in your body, you thought I worked by magic.

C’mon now. Calm down. You’re taking it all too much to heart!  (Sorry, I thought that was funny!) I was always talking about you, and in a positive way! We always said, “Follow your heart,” “The heart has its reasons which reason doesn’t have.”  All that cool romantic stuff! You had to be pleased!

Yes, and what about, “The heart is devious above all else, it is perverse,” All that Jeremiah stuff! I would get so sick and tired hearing about how wicked I was. Bad heart

Well, yes, there is that. But you have to admit, you did lead me astray a number of times

Whaattt! It was nothing to do with me, it was you with your sick imagination, I’m just a supply of motion to the propeller, it’s you and your precious brain that steers the ship!

So, you’re totally innocent. You’ve never done anything wrong?

No, I have not. I am innocent, and you are a jerk.

Listen, you’re being far too literal about everything. When we say “heart” in casual conversation we’re using a metaphor for the deepest, most essential part of the self. We’re not talking about you, that eleven-ounce muscle about the size of an average fist lodged in our chest. You have to make allowance for human language use.

So, now I’m too stupid to understand when people are talking about me, and when they mean something else. Well, let me tell you, you don’t have a word for that something else, because you don’t know what it is. But in the meantime, the truth is I AM the most essential thing in your life, I am the main event, but you don’t give me the respect you should. That whole metaphor thing is your way of wriggling out of the facts

But you just said it was my brain that made me do stuff, and now you say you really are the mainspring of life. Which is it?

I’m not arguing the point with you. You started the whole conversation because you said I’d treated you poorly. The fact is you didn’t know what I do, and now when I showed you, you come on like I’m behaving badly. But, really, I’ve always been that way, the passion of your life at its core, and you’ve been totally fine with it. I just gave you a wake-up call and now you have to change your whole way of understanding. lionYou have a lion of desire where you thought there was a sweet little puppy, and, more to the point, the lion’s no longer locked up in its cage.

That’s crazy, really crazy. I’m not sure I want to be talking to you like this. You suddenly become this lion all untamed, and about to tear itself free from me, but somehow you always were that way, and now it’s too late for me to do anything about it! What happened to “sweetheart,” to compassion, to the heart’s heart for the weak and wounded!

There you go again, saying stuff about me for things you actually can’t make sense of. Well, I would like to help you, I really would. And maybe I will feel better about it next week, or next year. But in the meantime, I have got your attention and that makes me happy. I’m just a muscle, like you say, and my operating life has a term limit, what do you say, a shelf life? All that other stuff you talk about, you’ll have to figure that out without me.

Well, that does make sense. I do see what you mean about my sloppy metaphors, making you responsible for things which we don’t have names for. So, what happens to those things when your angry lion does finally break free? Where will my real “heart” be then? sun heart

I guess you’ll have to wait and see. Maybe, if you get the chance, you could even let me know too!

The Bridge

There’s a bridge in San Francisco                                                                                20180907_170458

It runs clear across the bay

Bearing pilgrims to the winelands

To hope, and laugh and pray

 

The steel, the stone, the trusses

The piers, the towers, the spans,

My soul’s made of these connections

Forged hard for a builder’s plans

 

There’s a bridge in San Francisco

Come, let’s across the straits!

Let’s ride the crimson pillars

To where angels hold the gates

 

They’ll offer us the vintage

Golden Gate Bridge

Of spaces never known

The grapes of peace and gentleness

That one day we’ll call home

Terry Was My Brother

This is a quite personal response to my brother’s death. I am posting it here, among my other blogs, because I wish these words as a farewell to Terry, and I had no other public setting in which to deliver them.

I do not remember his birth–there were under two years between us. But I remember him being there, a new and constant presence among my mother’s things-to-do and bright roses on the wall of the back yard in 1949. He lay in his pram and I didn’t know his face but I knew he was somebody and he was there.

He was there when my aunt screamed in panic up the stairs, telling me and my older sister to get out of the bathroom and come down and shelter with the rest of the family under the kitchen table. A firework display in a nearby park resulted in loud explosions, and my mother and aunt were certain Hitler had come back and launched a deadly attack with rockets.

Everything in those days was after-the-war, and that went on all the way through until the sixties. Terry and his whole generation came of age in the sixties.

Before that decade most of our growing up was in the out-of-the-way Isle of Wight. We moved to the island in 1953, taking the ferry from Portsmouth across the shallow strip of water separating it from the English mainland. It was a strange place whose isolation was chosen by the authorities as ideal setting for a maximum security prison, H.M.P. Parkhurst. Our father worked as a Prison (Corrrections) Officer and had taken a job in Parkhurst as a hospital orderly, no doubt attracted by special wage incentives. For five years we shared the situation of those detained at the center of the island. Our only external reference points were the Catholic Church, St. Thomas in Newport, and our primary school, Carisbrooke Convent, with its looming feudal backdrop of a Norman castle.

Terry formed part of a trio, with myself and our younger sister, banded together in a hard, unlikely world. We played around the housing estate where the families of the prison officers lived, or on the clifftop farm where our mother had purchased an ex-army billet hut as unofficial family camp. Terry was a seamless part of that insular childhood experience: pretending to be pirates, climbing trees, following trails, building forts, creating a story saga around our toy plastic Indians, running away from gangs, confronting bullies.

He was intensely loyal. After we first moved and started at our convent primary school–which of course was not the local state school–a bunch of prison kids would steal our caps and rough us up as we walked home from the bus-stop. Deciding on a guerilla tactic we hid in the bushes and jumped on one of the meanest boys who was about our size, pummeling him with our little fists. Our success in dealing with this boy encouraged us to move on to the leader who was head and shoulders above us both. Again we jumped from the bushes, but he handed us a solid pasting and we had to turn and run. My brother took his lumps without flinching. And after that the gang did not bother us again.

Terry’s loyalty was a given, demonstrated time and again throughout his life. But there is passion which cuts deeper even than loyalty. We choose whom we are loyal to; passion chooses its objects for us. The objects of Terry’s passion, who knows? But they were certainly there.

The family moved to Portsmouth at the end of the island sojourn, but in a way we remained our own little island, enclosed in family bounds of church and home. It was only after we started to set out on individual life journeys that the wider world really confronted us, stretching loyalties while provoking passions. One time Terry came to visit me as a young man. It was likely the winter of 1968. I was at Buckden Towers, an historically B-list medieval building, just off the Great North Road, but displaying a noble skyline of castellated walls and three-storied keep. There was a fundraiser underway, with lots of alcohol, disco lights and music. Terry was working at a pig farm at the time, shortly after he had been told to leave the seminary in Ireland and never try a vocation to the priesthood anywhere else. He had a huge Afro haircut, long black greatcoat and a hacking cough. There were flecks of straw in his hair and on his coat, and his conversation was largely about how smart pigs were. It looked like he’d been living with them, just like the proverbial Prodigal Son. After he downed a few drinks he made his way to the roof of the Towers and stood looking out from the shaky battlements, glass in hand. I’d never seen him so dark, and felt it necessary to go back to check on him. What was he staring at as he gazed over the walls into the cold, inky night?  I never really knew, but it was desperate and terrible.

Terry

Somehow the Terry of his twenties dealt with his demons. And in so doing he helped me a great deal. More than he really knew. One of the reasons I went to spend time with him in England before he died was to tell him how much he meant to me in my own life. Somewhere in the same period as that dark visit to Buckden, Terry came to see me at another place where I was staying, a house in Oxfordshire attached to a Jesuit teaching institution, Heythrop College. We stayed up late in the community kitchen warmed by the big black Aga stove, and Terry told me about a book he’d read, Catcher in the Rye. We shared Holden Caulfield’s corrosive contempt for phony situations and people. Most of all, I saw my brother Terry standing up to be his own person in a difficult world, in a way that I had yet to manage. I saw that in many ways he was braver and more mature than me.

Others of Salinger’s novels made an ever greater impression on Terry. Those relating the story of the prodigiously talented Glass family, Raise High The Roof Beams, Carpenter and Franny and Zooey, were particularly beloved. At every opportunity he would praise these books as having a near-biblical worth. Why did Terry value so highly a story about a guy named Seymour who did not show up at his own wedding and a few years later committed suicide, yet whose memory and writings remained a spiritual treasure for his family?

In the light of this question, it is impossible not to mention my own wedding in 1986, and the fact that Terry did indeed show up, and did so to protest. He was grateful to be escorted out of the church before the beginning of the service by the best man and ushers, but he waited at the gate until the ceremony was over. It was a bit of a shock to see his ravaged face as I and Linda emerged in the courtyard to the strains of the Wedding March. This was another instance of loyalty–Terry took my mother’s part when she saw my getting married as legally inadmissible (given that I had taken a vow of celibacy in the R.C. church). I know Terry–certainly the Holden Caulfield Terry–did not want to do this, but blood overruled him. (At the same time, in hindsight, I cannot help but find more than a little subversive irony in Terry’s protest: in the end he was the only one of my family actually to show up at the wedding!)

Before all that happened, during the late 70’s, Terry came to work with me at Buckden Towers. He had returned to his studies and got a degree from UMIST, but when he was at a loose end after graduation I asked him to join me at the Towers. That half-millennial pile had emerged as a center of an energetic youth ministry fired by the spiritual renewal taking place in those years. The year he spent at Buckden was a happy time. He had undergone his own progressively deepened spiritual experience and this, together with his genial manner, Woodbine cigarettes and scorching left-wing analysis made him an object of both affection and fascination for the young people who would gather there. For me personally he represented a support I did not find in the religious order to which I belonged. When he left the Towers, that, and a number of other factors, began my own step by step separation from the life I was in. It was a journey which would result in a final break in 1984, and then that rather ill-tempered wedding two years later.

Terry took my mother’s part, but then he saw it as his job to effect a kind of reconciliation. After eight years he managed to get her to agree to meet me. It was an odd encounter but Terry saw it as a duty accomplished, squaring his loyalties both to her and to me. A few years later he also managed to arrange a meeting between my mother and my children–none of whom she had seen. My older two remember it and I am glad they had the chance of at least one physical memory of their grandmother. Terry was very satisfied that he had connected these pieces of the puzzle. Shortly before he died he bought Claddagh rings for each of my kids–“hands across the ocean”–and I know he was pleased that he had preserved that bit of the family heritage somewhat against the odds.

Terry never married. When the Irish say this about an older man they tend to do so with a mixture of sadness and approval. As if there is something quite noble about the solitary state–more often than not a matter of selfless service to said individual’s mother. There were apparently a couple of close brushes with the opposite sex. He told me about a woman from Iceland, and another from the Caribbean who had three children. When informed about the latter our mother remarked along the lines of “So, who would look after me?” And that, as they say, was that. But I never got the feeling these were huge losses for Terry. Whatever his passion was it carried him gracefully along the tracks of bachelorhood. (He once said to me–somewhere to the latter part of my own time in a religious order–“I think I would be better suited to your life, and you would be to mine.”)

So, about that attempt of his to be a priest? When he was eighteen Terry joined a Catholic missionary organization and seminary in Dublin, Ireland, but after a year he was told to leave. He wandered around Dublin for a couple of days, before finally heading back to England. It was following this he took work on the pig farm. To be told not to try anywhere else meant his superiors saw something they deemed a deal-breaker, not simply a poor fit. It’s impossible to know at this distance what that was; and why should I even bother? Well, it seemed Terry left money in his will to this same organization. The end of his life and his dispositions for his estate mirror something right at its outset, and they look like some kind of settling of accounts. My personal opinion is that we can never settle accounts: life is a free gift, and whatever we take from it can only be compensated by more absolutely free giving. And indeed, this could also have been what my brother was doing in a roundabout Zen way! However, why give freely to this organization, when there are so many urgent needs in the world?

Ultimately it is about where your passion lies, and it was perhaps the day of his death that displayed this most poignantly in Terry.

As it turned out I was alone with him. We’d had visits from the Cancer specialist and the Palliative Care doctor; one expected Terry to recover, the other that he still had weeks to live. Before that, about 11.00am, I prayed with him, giving thanks for Terry’s whole life and asking for various blessings on relatives and the world. The room was full of morning sun, Terry was very peaceful, his face and breathing in repose. The one point where he roused himself to an “Amen” was when we prayed for the R.C. church.

The priest came around 2.00. His name was Fr. Sean and he said one word, “Terry,” and my brother came out of his doze as if he’d been touched by an electric probe. He tried to lever himself up on his pillows and at the same time he tore off his oxygen mask. At this point his saturation levels were between 70 and 50 on pure O2 which means it was very dangerous to remove the mask. (Anything less than 90 is low.) We called the nurse and she got the mask back on again. The moment she left he pulled it off once more and this time his eyes rolled up and he went unconscious. I put the mask back on and his eyes returned to focus. I was now standing guard and the priest proceeded with communion and anointing. I extended the mask off his face for him to receive the wafer and sprung it straight back. When it came to the anointing Terry held out his arms rigidly in front of him like someone doing a strength exercise or some kind of parade ground salute. The muscles of his upper arms began to buckle and pop but he held the position with superhuman will-power until the priest had finished putting the oil on his hands. I don’t know why Fr. Sean didn’t tell him to relax and put his hands down on the covers.

The priest left. Shortly after they brought some lunch. Terry had a few mouthfuls and a sip or two of juice. I went out myself to get a drink. When I got back his breathing had changed. Terry died at 3.40. Without any kind of struggle. He just slipped away. His passion done.

Last year, shortly after Terry was first diagnosed with cancer, he sent me this message. “Thankfully I have not been really worried or concerned by the cancer. Do you remember the old hymn or poem that ended, ‘The child of God can fear no ill, his chosen dread no foe, we leave our fate to thee and wait thy bidding when we go; it’s not from chance our comfort springs, Thou are our trust, O king of kings.’ Guess I must actually believe that.”

Flashback. It’s 1979, and Buckden again. It’s the end of the summer and I am having an asthma attack. I was hardly getting episodes at all in those days, and yet somehow I feel this one is dangerous. I ask Terry to sleep in the room next to me, not confident I could get anyone in the community to respond promptly or sympathetically. Sure enough, in the small hours it is a crisis. I knock desperately on the wall and Terry does not need to be asked twice. He at once summons the doctor. The man arrives with his Gladstone, gets out a needle and shoots me with adrenalin. The transformation is immediate, miraculous. I have never quite experienced anything like it, before or since. Free flowing breath and a strong heart, who would not give the skies above for this? I pray that my brother Terry gets some crazy other-than-medical adrenalin in those small hours and remote rooms we call death.

LOVE’S TIDE

 

If you were walking on the line

Namibian desert dunes

Of a vast and mighty strand

Where all the sea had fled away

And all you knew was sand

You might ask from where it was

These grains of rock took birth

And whence indeed th’uncanny wind

Which breathes of sea to earth

Then all at once as you walked

A tide came skipping onslightly_high_tide_splash_by_brichards85-d4kkt3g

A million million rivers flood

To lift the rocks with song

Then you saw those wastes of stone

For the shoreline that they were

The ancient ebb of an ocean deep

A Springtide long deferred

 

Even so the universe

And all worlds that may be

Feel within the deep defect ofsearch

Some long departed sea

Yet suddenly the rocks may spin

And sense their endless night

As both decoy and the deed

Of love hidden in plain sight

 

And all at once that love will rise

That long did hide its face–

For love will not be bargained for

But must know its own embrace–

And the sea, the sea, is running in

To arms held open widesearch

A million milion rivulets

Of love’s returning tide!

 

Watchface

 

The minute hand of my watch

Crossing the hour bows its head

In prayer, all the way to deep

Meditation at the meridian,

Headfirst into the abyss of six.

Almost without noticing

Its movement becomes

A rising up, to alleluia at eleven

And the full sundial glory of noon.

But the humble hour hand shadows

Everything, conserving every revolution

In its lower slower sweep, until

All time is gathered into love.

The second prays incessantly, up,

Down, it makes no difference,

The heart-attack tempo of our days

Ticking toward its truth