Granite hard and metal legend
Scribed thrust forth from clotted clay where
Once sprung garden bounty, secret
Sudden disgorging on frigid
Moon-silvered longest night after
Divine alchemist with cauldron
Stark fused in a single moment’s
Roaring flash your ashes stolen
From hilltop near to make this
Emergent stone, reminder to
All who pass of your presence gone.
.
(I dug the hole; Chris set the rock.)
.
See here—another marker stone,
Heavier far, lodged in my chest.
Thirty-three years in arriving,
This dream of your ageless crafting
Settles over me in Easter
Predawn cold, damp-coated craving—
But not for you, these decades late.
.
Little matter. You flitted through
Fuzzy sight with laughing face and
Luring smile cast on bodies
Mostly male, mostly seething lust;
Till lost from view, gone past the edge.
.
Then sudden spinning me round and
Enfolding me, arms clutching tight,
Squeezing in spasms out of time,
Leaving heart in rapt compressions—
Taut bands of bonding and bondage.
There is a spike, zinc-coated steel,
I drove into the frozen earth
While your ashes and bone chips
Were still in sight, when winter cold
Strangled field and heart in frigid grip.
Marked the spot of your last touching
With an enduring reminder
Witnessed only by you and me.
.
Now one growing season later,
One arc of birth upon birthing—
Fescue, thistle, cicada, ant,
Field mouse, rabbit, chickadee, wren,
Recumbent doe disgorging twins—
Not only are your ashes and
Bone chips gone but steel marker too,
Swallowed whole by rapacious life.
.
The knowledge and finality
Of that condition does not halt
My searching for some hint of you
Or the sign I’d left against the
Prospect of such erasure of
What remained of my last compass.
I grope on hands and knees, blind to
Bits of you inhaled with each breath.
Conceived in longing, fed it in the womb,
We grow soon used to our heart’s gasping
Sips of sustenance in kiss, fleeting smile
Fed into voracious vacuum dark—
Need so empirical and consummate
It defines our natural prospect,
A fate chosen or freely accepted
Ages past.
.
Now ended for me in you.
Let me count the ways . . .
If humankind survives very far into the future (hardly a certainty, but we can hope), much time and thought will be spent trying to understand the impact of the COVID pandemic on the lives and societies that endured and outlasted it (peace to those that didn’t). As I write these words, much time has already been spent in that effort. I’ve read and heard and seen a random selection of these attempts—learned from some, dismissed others.
I would say that for most if not all of such speculations, we are still too close to the event to have the necessary historical and cultural perspective to assess it. Imagine writing about the impact of the events of September 11, 2001 on, say, January 1, 2003, before the Iraq war and two decades of conflict in Afghanistan. A year or two out, we were still blinded by the trauma, and residual haze, of the event itself, could not fathom the national and global changes it instigated, a legacy of division that plagues our world.
And so too now, with the COVID pandemic still killing hundreds in the U.S. and thousands across the globe each day, and many pre-pandemic habits and norms still overshadowed by fear and doubt, it is way too early to have perspective on the event and its meaning. Possibly the pandemic will never end, as the virus morphs into ever more contagious and deadly strains. In any case, we are still in the midst of the battle, however much we wish we were not.
And so it is from the midst of the battle that I offer these reflections—premature, partial, and tentative—on a condition we have come to know all too well: vulnerability.
What is it to be vulnerable? If we stop to think about it, we are vulnerable from the womb until laid in the coffin or sifted into the urn—a loop of the umbilical cord around our fetal neck, a toddling wander too close to the pool, a rotten limb overhead giving way, a car crossing the centerline, an allergen triggering anaphylaxis, a cell mutating to cancer. And on and on—endless vulnerabilities. What is new with the pandemic is that most of us are now aware of our constant vulnerability. How could we not be when we are forced to worry about touching a doorknob, as we rearrange the mask on our face or refill the bottles of hand sanitizer arranged like modern-day stepping stones across the debris field of our modern-day lives? The challenge before us is not vulnerability but a refreshed and ever refreshening awareness of the condition. And unlike former brushes with such awareness—the tornado warning beeping on our phone, the hurricane’s wind’s roar, the smoke from the wildfire, even the fear of falling victim to acts of mass terrorism in the weeks following 9/11—the pandemic’s forced awareness grinds on and on, some twenty nonstop months and counting. You’d think we’d grow familiar with the condition, like civilians in a war zone, blithely going about their daily lives with bombs blasting in the distance and bullets whizzing past.
And perhaps we have grown familiar with it to some degree. Certainly our response to the condition has evolved. I recall those early days of lockdown when all that mattered was getting through the next eight hours without exposure to the virus, and making sure we had enough toilet paper. Now our gaze both forward and back extends a little further than eight hours (though worries over toilet paper apparently persist, based on the stores’ purchase limits). Increasing familiarity with vulnerability allows some degree of reflection on the condition.
And discovered what?
Throughout this twenty-month catastrophe, I have been fortunate to be able to sequester myself in a safe and pristine preserve with only occasional forays into the dangerous “out there”. And from this sanctuary, I’ve had maybe too much time to weigh my losses—of company, of purpose, of spiritual sustenance and renewal; of laughter, shouts, joy. And most painful of all—the loss of loved ones gone forever without a final visit or shared in-person mourning.
And what have I learned from this too much time to reflect on too much loss? I’ve discovered an inversion, and stumbled on it in the most unlikely of sequences.
The first step in the sequence was a loss of faith. I never lost my faith in the master creator we call God (and to which I will assign a feminine pronoun for her creative and nurturing character, though I assume she is genderless). My closer observation of the wonder and complexity and intricacies of the natural world around me only increased my faith in God.
But I lost faith in the human institutions meant to reflect God’s love—in the church, in religion, in charitable efforts, in art. I understand that this loss of faith in these structures was really disillusionment with their means of fulfilling their mission. But if an organization or institution is set up for in-person sharing, what is left when everything is forced to go remote? Attend a remote funeral or concert or meeting, as we all have. Maybe it works for you. It doesn’t work for me. And what about the deathbed visit via Zoom or phone call or text? Yeah, right . . .
So out the window with faith in human institutions. Give me the tree or the flower or the chipmunk ruffling the leaves.
But you know what I discovered in my close observation of and interaction with (to the extent the natural world will let this lumbering and clueless Homo sapiens in) the natural world? If you are looking for any relief or immunity from the plague of vulnerability, you’ve come to the wrong place. The flower nipped by frost or crushed by a hoof, the chipmunk snared by the fox, the songbird by the hawk, the tree snapped by the ice storm. And those wild things have their own versions of lethal pandemics, as the white-nose syndrome in bats and the eye disease decimating finches and ash trees wiped out by the ash borer, to name just a few of hundreds of invasive plagues.
I read a book about human saints nurturing two orphaned hummingbird chicks. It was meant to be uplifting and was in fact so, as these chicks survived and were released back into the wild. But I could barely read the words for the tears filling my eyes at the thought of how vulnerable these tiny precious creatures were and how extreme the odds against their survival. In short, the tale of these orphaned chicks struck all too close to home. Nature, however beautiful and complex, was not going to offer an antidote to fear of vulnerability.
Was there an antidote? Or is a life of fear all that’s left? I peered into a very dark hole with nothing to distract me. Day after day.
Then a friend suggested I write more poetry.
Well, for me writing poetry requires faith. Specifically, it requires faith in love, for poetry and all art that has meaning for me finds its power in love. But I’d lost my faith in love. The pandemic had ground it to nothing, or forced it into hiding.
But I did have poems written before the pandemic, when love, and faith in its efficacy, were not only present but were the center of my existence. So I pulled those poems out, reread them, published some on this blog. It was an emotional, and emotionally complex, experience. It reminded me of just how much I’ve lost in recent years. It was like looking in upon someone else’s purposeful life.
But in that forlorn gazing, I gradually came to realize something else. Each of the poems was about one of two subjects—either love or loss, with those about love directed at the living and those about loss directed toward the deceased. Now here’s the strange part. I found myself consoled by the poems about loss, and unsettled, often saddened, by those about love.
What the heck?
These encounters with distant poems left me to conclude that the pandemic, and its heightening of my awareness of vulnerability, have caused me to doubt love and trust loss.
But the emerging picture is not nearly as grim as that summary would suggest. In fact, it’s not grim at all.
The poems about love are bittersweet, about a feeling that has changed or will change as people separate and drift apart or, ultimately, are separated by death. That reality is all too familiar in these days of COVID. In short, love is vulnerable, acutely so, always has been.
On the other hand, death and the loss caused by it is not vulnerable. The worst has happened. No further harm can be done. And in those ashes—strangely, miraculously—healing begins. Those departed loved ones have drawn closer to me in the last twenty months than in the long years before. Their presence is unmoving and unmovable, a sure rock on which to stand, or a cave in which to safely hide while the storms out there rage and roar.
And from the safety offered by these once lost now found loved ones, I startle myself with a fresh willingness to make a small but determined leap of faith that translates (faith always being untranslatable into words) something like this: If comfort and consolation and security can not only survive but thrive beyond death, and if comfort and consolation and security are the surest marks of love, then love for those on this side of death’s divide must be every bit as permanent and trustworthy, not slave to the whim of an invisible virus or victim of our awareness of our vulnerability. Separation will not end love, not even the separation of death.
Or so I hope, adrift on my raft, with all those I love drifting alongside, on the calm and enfolding sea of those departed loved ones, carrying us along, keeping us safe.
Placid floating on placid creek—
Air entrapped within vinyl skin
To suspend the air and water
Entrapped within this organic
Epidermis over the life
Entrapped within this water world.
Life revealed again and for the
First time to these famished eyes
Probing tea-brown clear depths for signs
Of life beyond the known, hints of
Hope the other side of tactile.
And find there in ghostly pale hand
Drifting far below, a magnet
To these silver darts of light—there
Then gone, gone then there—curious
Intimations of life on that
Far side of the bridge of this hand
Now numb vestige of once living
Soul.
Near the fresh start of two long ago lives
You graced my soul with gifts pure and free
As shrieks of joy unimpeded by fear
Wonder in toddler’s legs functioning new
And mystical visit to guide me home
One day shrouded in clouds of rain and gloom.
.
In the warm glow of those dazzling gifts
I labored for words of adequate thanks
My efforts as strained as your offerings sure
Settled on a poem titled with your name
Words meaningless to the one pointed toward
Hapless attempt to document your shine.
.
And now so many dawns and deaths removed
Visit two—unexpected, undeserved—
When your name cast forth into cyber void
Returns recent photo from distant shore—
No doubting the face however much grown
Or the blessing it beams through shrouds anew.
1) I prowl your now near-empty house
Like a cage—restless wandering,
Growling at walls, not free to leave
By the door purposefully left
Open, fettered by your presence—
Potent still in these rooms nine months
Vacant, in these random tokens
Left as worthless in the wake of
Repeated gleanings–dusty Miss
Piggy angel still flying past
Your kitchen window, arm-broken
Crucified Jesus propped in dark
Corner of your study—objects
As useless to you now as to
The world (as you well knew, proclaimed
In radio voice to that world
Through prescient broadcast years before).
Then why won’t they let me go?
.
2) Morning walk to seize the day’s news—
Safely secured under arm and
Lung-stretching heart-laboring brisk
Pumping back up the hill you now
Beside me, your strides (legs working
Again after all these years) as
Easy as mine are labored, no
Words or touch we walk together
A few yards till I turn to speak
And find no one there. I laugh once—
At my folly or your trick or
Both—then continue on my way,
Feel you again beside me, step
For step, till we reach the crest of
The hill and you suddenly stop,
Fall back, but expend your latent
Power in a gentle nudge to
My striving, blessing my onward.
Same hand that covered yours on the table,
Reached across and caressed your cheek.
Same hand that twined its fingers through yours,
Locked together on walks, in church.
Same hand that caught you from falling on ice,
Latched onto yours through fear of crowds.
Same hand that prepared those meals from scratch,
Held your chair, poured you a glass of wine.
Same hand that wrote you poems, addressed a letter,
Opened your notes then stored them safe.
Same hand that brushed your hair on the pillow,
Touched your sleeping eyelids, felt your breaths.
Same hand that will always know your touch,
Always reach for you in darkness, in light.
Same hand, same hand.
jeffreyandersonfiction 