Sabbath # 77

Before the door closes, I’m at my desk. And this morning the shades are open and light streams in. Yesterday, dark with storms: lightening and solid sheets of rain. I can’t take my eyes off Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in Just Kids, and in comparison, myself. Conventionality, my mother of invention. My brief moments of irreverence turned toward reading what I wanted to read along with bringing up the babies. My best self given in the caring of others. Creating art? It’s hard not to compare. Not being on that scene but another. One step away. One step closer. Only look back if it is helpful. Move. Come upon your subject from every angle. Exhaust yourself. You have everything you need and then some: tables that hold books and notes, a desk, one good pen, ink, paper from Paris, a long view. Clouds are gathering again in the northwest and cicadas are sounding an alarm. I’ve opened the window to weather. Humidity. Driven back to Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Celan. Yesterday Market Street was a river flowing swiftly to the creek. Today the riverbed is dry. No standing water. The grasses greener still. On Friday we discovered that sections of marsh were mowed, cut back on Chincateague. Why? We don’t know. Maybe like a burn, for new growth? After yesterday the basins must have more water. Migration already in motion. All summer, a desert. Cracked soil. One step, one step. One more promise. Once more. Once more. Yesterday, I moved through several layers in a short time. I gave myself permission. Nothing to lose really. Nothing to lose. 

  

Sabbath #76

Suddenly and surprisingly the air cooled last night and I opened the window this morning. Sweet dew on the ground, sunlight muted by thin clouds. Bird song and a small rabbit in the front yard where my imaginary labyrinth exists.  I love the solitude of Sunday mornings, expectations minimal. Sipping tea, leafing through a book of verse, picking a random page to read: “Reading Li Po / how ‘the peach blossom follows the water.’/ I keep thinking of you…” And my own poem written twelve years ago:” Unlock the forty thousand gates.” I live with the hope that more doors are opening than closing, but with age the realization that some events will most likely not happen now seems inevitable. I may live in San Francisco but probably not New York. I may hike sections of the Appalachian and Pacific Coast Trails but not their entireties. I will most likely not ski black diamond runs at Lake Tahoe nor participate in the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon. Yesterday I told my husband about driving Robert Bly from Bennington Vermont to Woodstock New York in the middle of January with a light snow falling. I still wear the sweater I bought that day at a small boutique, Woodstock Designs. And this morning I’m anticipating the unusual in this most conventional life. I’m prepared for that moment. Not so much in a heart beat as in deliberate stroke, oar dug deep, force and strength pushing forward. Stopping in down dog to catch five breaths. I pin up my hair, press the linen. wear the smoothest of panties, silk like. Walk barefoot as much as possible. This summer I ate a peach a day, sometimes letting the juice run down my chin. I wake around three thirty in the morning and am amazed with darkness. Sometime I go back to sleep. Often I wait for the light. I’m good at guessing the time. Somedays I don’t quite know how I arrived at this particular place. I still am in need of rest although I’m no longer bone weary. And there is an ease that comes with feeling safe, however true or false. I want to be braver, braver still. Risk everything and know that all things are possible. Venus passing close to the earth. Views from Mars arriving every day. I’m thinking ocean. I’m thinking city life and loved ones near-by. I’m thinking words in a book. I’m thinking colophons, acknowledgements. I’m thinking fresh cantaloupe and vine ripened tomatoes, sunflower bread. I’m thinking Patty Smith, Sylvia Plath, Pussy Riot jailed in Russia for two years. I stop and look out the window. People are beginning to arrive at the Presbyterian Church next door. It’s steeple and stained glass frame my window. Stark white, blue and amber. One larger pained glass. A minute ago I heard the bells from the Methodist Church down the street ring, the ending of the first service. Today. What is brave?

 

Sabbath #75

And what to say about summer’s last days. After my father’s death. After my children returned to their homes. After my husband’s own losses settled in. We’re left with high humidity and afternoon thunderstorms, plants needing water and peaches rotting in the wood bowl on the kitchen counter. Fatigue forbids us from feeling the successes of photographs printed, manuscripts in the mail. Maybe later this morning redemption will follow me down the sidewalk as I cross the street, peek into the Presbyterian Church on the corner. Meanwhile I’ve eaten the last good peach, the egg my husband boiled for me earlier before he left the house, brewed my tea. I lit the Morning Star incense. This week it’s Galway Kinnell’s Wait.  “Wait, for now.” Notice the comma. “Distrust everything if you have to. / But trust the hours. Haven’t they/ carried you everywhere, up to know?” I miss Jason and Liam. I miss my mother. I miss Cape Cod and my grandchildren , watching them swim in Buzzard’s Bay. I miss my daughter’s footfalls. I miss my son’s questioning looks. It’s too quiet here. Only the cicada’s, the crape myrtle. “Personal events will become interesting again./ Hair will become interesting./ Pain will become interesting./ Buds that open out of season will become interesting.” I have thank you notes to write. Rent to pay. I must deposit money in the bank.  “Wait./Don’t go too early. You’re tired. But everyone’s tired./ But no one is tired enough.” Green zebra tomatoes, yellow squash, red peppers and basil wait for me to do something with them. And there’s a cantaloupe from last week. I’m depending on blind appreciation, a hand resting on my thigh. “…music of hair, /music of pain,/ music of looms weaving all our loves again./ Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,/ most of all to hear/ the flute of your whole existence ,/rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.” Give up melancholia. Give up waiting. Stop praying kaddish. Let the force of kindness overcome you. You are known to the Divine.

Sabbath #71 Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon

Before the funeral I read the lines aloud alone first in my study then in the kitchen standing at the sink looking out into the yard, practicing how my voice might sound after my father’s dying. Each time my voice not faltering until I read: Let it come, as it will, and don’t / be afraid. God does not leave us / comfortless, so let evening come. I knew these where the words I was hoping were true. Time unfolded as it does: my husband driving and guiding me where we needed to go, arriving at my father’s home minutes after he had passed. A silent, solemn household. The quiet and stillness that only comes from death in a room. Whispering as if not to wake the person or disturb the atmosphere, any remaining molecules or last breaths. My children arriving one by one from Ohio, from California. The relief in a gaze, an embrace. The not needing to be strong, but instead feeling what one feels with death present. The buying of pound cake and cookies, white wine, watermelon because it is summer. Bags of ice. My brothers and their wives gathering for a meal. The cousins together, all grown. Beautiful, everyone and enough brightness to reassure us. All old enough now to notice we need care taking at the loss of our father. That we are not doing so well. In the early morning before steam rose from the banks, we crossed the James River by ferry. Our father planned this pilgrimage. Time enough to settle in the gentle rocking. Looking over to the other shore moving closer and closer to the moment of burial, our father having already arrived at Union Christian Cemetery. We drove past corn and peanuts and soybeans. Farmland. We arrived at the small one room church where I heard him preach just once many years ago. We walked around without direction until we could no longer avoid the appointed time. My husband welcomed us with prayer. My children, standing beside me. My brother’s scattered about, a few dear friends. My father’s other family, his wife of 13 years and her grown children and grandchildren, polite, reverent with their memories. Three of my four brothers spoke, each in tears, my sister-in-law, one niece. My father’s oldest friend, blind and barely able to walk. I knew the order. I knew when I was to read but I couldn’t move. My thoughts lingering with each person speaking. My husband looked at me, I at him. Then the most tender of gestures: he walked with his hand held out and reached for me. I stepped toward him.  Oh, yes. It is my turn. Before I read the rehearsed poem, I surveyed my family’s faces, their weeping. Not just grief but love, overwhelming love. I told them about our father keeping a notebook under the mattress, about him taking me to the library when I was young. I understood the possibility of writing down words, one after the other. The light in the hallway of the library. Then I looked down to the book I held in my hands. The page marked. Let Evening Come. I knew what was coming: the bales of hay, the cricket chafing like right now as I was reading, the abandoned hoe in long grass, the fox, the wind, the shed black inside, the bottle in the ditch, scoop in the oats, air in a lung. The bough of sunflowers on his casket. Don’t / be afraid. God does not leave us /comfortless. I read it for each person. I read it to remind myself. And it was the truth. The glorious truth of grace after death.