That Word Read online

  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

  and beating hearts—

  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.