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“O when I get that true religion, hallyloo.” Old folk song.
There are things we are
which are like other things
we love or don't love
or fix all night and repair
as if we were climbing mountains
or falling in mountains of hair.
Two things when my father died:
His heart stopped. The electric motor
feeding pellets into his pellet stove stopped.
Waiting in the cold for the shipping of the motor, the morning of day three,
wearing layers, we use other warm devices, languidly.
I want to go. But time zones of cold keep me in place. Temperatures are homeless.
Probate is easier electronically. Money is immortal.
When hospice replaces hospital, the money rolls in.
Dad expired quickly to save money for his family.
He was beyond talk of survival and sin.
I was the priest at his ear, alternately child and parent,
"Daddy, daddy!" Or "It's going to be okay,"
speaking to him as if he was, but was not, here.
My voice broke. He became my daddy, again; it was wild.
Inert, but his heart (strong, the nurses said) beat. I journeyed into his ear,
played him "True Religion" by Erik Darling,
a folk record he owned when I was a child.
My mother was the risen, quiet, sun burning bravely through clouds.
Surely not because that was her.
How could the sun be her?
After her death (a cold time of year, too)
It was how I saw her. In my thoughts, her manifestation;
in my sad being, this is how she was there.
But wouldn't it be like my lyrical, but practical, father
not to be the brave sun but a stove!
Fearing his heart was weak, he focused on his flaws.
You are like this. We are objects which cannot love!
We hate ourselves, thinking everyone else is breaking the laws
that we, passionately in our sorrow, follow,
wishing, in the end, that we could be a strong thing---
O wish for transformation! Occupied, now, this poem, by the meditative, the strange, the new.
That's what we say. Examine life, always, with far, burning fragments,
which we can vanish into,
dissolving a little bit into the little bit left by you.
