Wedding

The lights are in
paper lanterns, on a string, and
hung from eave to branch

bare arm touches bare arm, and skin
is cool, and moist, from night air, and heads
rest on shoulders and chests, for comfort, for
being weary, and for
missing someone, and hands stray to cheeks
and brows, and hair is
tucked behind ears, and twirled idly, and words
are only murmured

music strays from here to there, carries and
fades, dew collects on the spider webs

remembering is this,
is a literal trap
gray dawn spreads, not breaks,

the faint smell of eucalyptus, and
those who sleep
now flying

gray dawn spreads
indifferent
and turns the windows
opaque with light.

Untitled

the hotel smelled of
mold and bleach and it was where she was
careful, and alone, and on stage, and self
involved and she didn't drop it or raise its
hairy self up in the air and
smash it down on a rock point, hard hard
hard to crack it, split it, with all the satisfaction of a
well-earned split, like a lip, and the dry
smear of blood that leaves, like a feathery
brush of blush on paper, a demo, this is how you can
make yourself up, to look good, to be
pretty, or beautiful, but I digress -

the hotel smells like red wine
on her breath in the morning, from the pores, from
the neglectful way she keeps her clothes, expensive and poorly
laundered, from the way she bangs away at it
without enough conviction
to split it
hairy side from hairy side
clean split
and the white flesh exposed
to eat deliciously into
the clean fluid
coming forth.

Untitled

He thinks it is a philosophical wasteland, a
measure of him and a measure of March
grit under his shoe, to turn his ankle so
and grind it and he forgets, he
doesn't know what he is for and
so again he is an impotent boy in the brown woods with
homemade red woollen mittens, with the hiss and
loneliness of beginning snow, pit pat, and the
house maybe visible maybe not through the trees
the rising stomach of alone, and untended, and the
long strain of his eye and ear for that house ten or fifteen steps
further out, or further in, and
a voice calling to come home, a seeking of the
house, and the mittens, and the no one, and how it can all
be reduced to one grind in the turn of
an ankle, a shoe, a gesture of
conscious intent, the abstraction of bony hands
knitting, knit purl knit, the arthritic knuckles knobbed and brushing the
grit stippled into his palms, and smoothing and
soothing the
reddened skin away.

What Was The Point of That/Retrospect

Burn Through/Persistence

Integrated

Heart

Loneliness I - V

So What About February

Every Monday we start board meeting with a something from the chaplain. Bob read this last week, and I liked it. I don't usually resonate with much of what he chooses to read. Partially because of the point of view of what he chooses, and partly because of the manner in which he reads it. Offhand. We're all business in meetings, but at the same time, everyone's just come in from the field, from living rooms and bedrooms. From the intimacy of fear. And the intimacy of the body, the sick body. From sacred spaces. And I don't think its just the hospice thing. I think everyone is always about one heartbeat away from a sacred space. Every single person eating burritos in the restaurant around you, every single other parent watching their kids with a mix of pleasure and boredom at the playground. No one has to feel it or know it, but there it is. You just have to be willing to point your finger at it, and say, There.

Bob had Bell's palsy last month and he's better, though his speech is still slurred. It warmed me to him. The way he had his eye taped shut and his slurring and drooping face, and the way he bore it without drama, or comment, or anything. He read this is his slurry speech and something about his quiet uncomplaining dignity over the past month and the sentiment of the reading said to me, There. And I was glad for that.



I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.

Then someone at my side says: "There, she is gone!"

"Gone where?"

Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says: "There, she is gone!" there are other eyes watching her coming and other voices ready to take up the glad shout: "Here she comes!"

And that is dying.