Consolations

There is no way to prepare for or understand catclysm, though go on we do. Unimaginable losses are buried, they ghost the architecture for a good while (we still peer into the abysms of the Titanic, hearing the cries of the doomed), the edifaces are razed and trucked away for months (like the World Trade Center), the ash remains on our windowpanes for years (like Mt. St. Helens).

Who knows what is to come? But mythological faith tells us that though we don't know what the future holds, we do know who holds it -- the resources for our future come from our deep past, so we can take comfort and solace from those who have suffered greatly before us and gone on to praise God and remake the world.

I think of the cellist in Sarajevo during the siege who had no more employment -- the symphony had long been disbanded, no power in the hall, most of his fellow artists dead, buried in the great soccer field -- who got up every day and took his cello out into the streets, settling into bomb craters that had been made the night before -- and began to play the most gorgeous keening worshipful music his heart and hands could empty out -- filling those holes with the beautful, the human, the eternal -- Isn't that good
coaching for all of us? To sing in the drowned parishes of New Orleans, to tell the old tales of death and transformation and rebirth?

Thus, the following is a good prayer for the day -- from one who I call the patron saint of every lost or drowned pet of that region -- marching orders for we who have heard the tales --

ST. FRANCIS PRAYER

"Lord, make me a channel of thy peace, that where there is hatred, I may bring love; that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness; that where there is discord, I may bring harmony; that where there is error, I may bring truth; that where there is doubt, I may bring faith; that where there is despair, I may bring hope; that where there are shadows, I may bring light that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.

"Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted; to understand, than to be understood; to love, than to be loved. For it is by self-forgetting that one finds. It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.

"It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life.

"Amen."


Thus, these consolations:


HARM AND BOON IN THE MEETINGS

Jack Gilbert

We think the fire eats the wood.
We are wrong. The wood reaches out
to the flame. The fire licks at
what the wood harbors, and the wood
gives itself away to that intimacy,
the manner in which we and the world
meet each new day. Harm and boon
in the meetings. As heart meets what
is not heart, the way the spirit
encounters the flesh and the mouth meets
the foreignness in another mouth. We stand
looking at the ruin of our garden
in the early dark of November, hearing crows
go over while the first snow shines coldly
everywhere. Grief makes the heart
apparent as much as sudden happiness can.


CONSOLATION

2000

Lying on the couch
beneath a blanket
on a cold Saturday
morning weary
with the flu
& resting a spell
before grinding
into the day's work

Drowsing
to Bach preludes
transcribed for
piano drifting along
the delicate
pour and weave
of notes a gentle
counterpoint
to hard worries
about my marriage
& what's rising
in the cracked
ground below

I slept a spell
then opened
my eyes
to a perfect
calm: The sky
in the window
a deep blue
& the room
bathed with
bright hard sunlight
& the cats
each on a big
chair turned in
the same
a left spiral
of sleep

The music
threaded it
all together
in a lace
more delicate
than snow on ice

& I thought

That's the
consolation
of art brief
walks on
a postcoital
beach we
never deserve
and so
ungraciously
receive

I remembered
cold winter
mornings in
Spokane 20
years ago
when I'd sit
on a heat grate
sucking a beer
with all the
tatters of night
bleeding in me

I'd listen
to an album
of Bach harp
partitas & watch
the sun play
brilliantly on
icy streets outside
& for a few

moments I was
back on the beach
with my mother
when I was 2
with the sea
in heaven dancing

O how purely
I wanted to
bridge my days
to that one
To pin the
wings of that
art onto
my life

& Oh how
I failed

All I've
learned since
then is how
these glories
are so paired
with the failure
to sustain them

Oh well
at moments like
these the
dance is perfect
a Bach
prelude to
whatever comes
a counterpoint
of light and sound
in the harmony
of what never
remains



POPPIES

Mary Oliver

The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn't a place
in this world that doesn't

sooner or later drown
in the indigoes of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage

shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,

black, curved blade
from hooking forward-
of course
loss is the great lesson.

But also I say this: that light
is an invitation to happiness,
and that happiness,


when it's done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.
Inside the bright fields,

touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight-

and what are you going to do-
what can you do
about it-
deep, blue night?




... More and more in my life and in my work I am guided by the effort to correct our old repressions, which have removed and gradually estranged us from the mysteries out of whose abundance our lives might become truly infinite. It is true that these mysteries are dreadful, and people have always drawn away from them. But where can we find anything sweet and glorious that would never wear this mask, the mask of the dreadful? Life - and we know nothing else - , isn't life itself dreadful? ... Whoever does not, sometime or other, give his full consent, his full joyous consent to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; ...To show the identity of dreadfulness and bliss, those two faces on the same divine head, indeed this one single face, which just presents itself this way or that, according to our distance from it or state of mind in which we perceive it - : this is the true significance and purpose of the Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus.

- Ranier Maria Rilke (transl. Mitchell)

***

Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my freinds, then yo8u said yes to all woe as well. All things are chained and entwined together, all things are in love;

if you ever wanted one moment twice, if you ever said, "You please me, happiness, instant moment!" then you wanted everything to return!

You wanted everything anew, everything eternal, everything cahined, entwined together, everything in love, o that is how you loved the world ...

-- Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra


MANGER SCENE II

Up he rises from the dumpster
Behind the Pink Pussycat, the
Full receipt of every lost and
Forlorn ache which you deigned not
To receive. Amid the empty
Buds and butts and vomit-
Smelling rags he's the crown prince,
Mewling (OK, groaning) as
Any babe would arising from
Such death. Well, he and I begin
Here, amid Her sordid trash.
The sour light proclaims a cracked and
Bleeding dawn -- poor afterbirth
Indeed though the psalm proclaim
New motion where old salt was lain.


BEGIN HERE

Begin here
where there
is no poetry,
only the clutter
of late winter,
the manic
mind's exile
in motion,
whirligagging
with the cold
moon for the
sake of something
to whirl.

Begin here
where there is
no beginning,
only these
shattered pixels
of sour winter light
swaddling the
frozen rubble of
last year's rot.

Here where
nothing and less
contend for
winter's
miserable crown
poetry sparks a fuse,
urging the day
down a simple
and singular path,

winding through
the ghetto

of bleak afternoons
to a quiet field
where berries
may yet sprout
like fire in the
heart of the city

o yes
this poor master
of silence and silk
asks only
that you
begin here:


A WALK IN LATE SUMMER

Theodore Roethke

1.
A gull rides on the ripples of a dream,
White upon white, slow settling on a stone;
Across my lawn the soft backed creatures come,
In the weak light they wander, each alone.
Bring me the meek, for I would know their ways;
I am a connoisseur of midnight eyes.
The small! The small! I hear them singing clear
On the long banks, in the soft summer air.

2.
What is there for the soul to understand?
The slack face of the dismal pure inane?
The wind dies down; my will dies with the wind,
God's in that stone, or I am not a man!
Body and soul transcend appearances
Before the caving-in of all that is;
I'm dying piecemeal, fervent in decay;
My moments linger-that's eternity.

3.
A late rose ravages the casual eye,
A blaze of being on a central stem.
It lies upon us to undo the lie
Of living merely in the realm of time.
Existence moves toward a certain end-
A thing all earthly lovers understand.
That dove's elaborate way of coming near
Reminds me I am dying with the year.

4.
A tree arises on a central plain-
It is no trick of change or chance of light.
A tree all out of shape from wind and rain,
A tree thinned by the wind obscures my sight.
The long day dies; I walked the woods alone;
Beyond the ridge two wood thrush sing as one.
Being delights in being, and in time.
The evening wraps me, steady as a flame.