Before dawn each day

I rise

ground the beans,

brew the coffee

that I bring to Pat each day

in her favorite Starbuck’s mug

from Kyoto, Japan given to her

by Aiko K...so of Nara

who will become in November

in Christ Church Kealakekua, Hawaii,

Aiko K...o D...iou, a lovely addition

to our tribe. Each Tuesady, Thursday,

and Sunday in this season

with the aged and blind basset at my side,

I water the flowers

that proffer such superabundance

of disinterested beauty;

I tend the birds virtually every day

whose arrivals

and departures grant such pleasure,

who know why?

I say the prayers and read

the poets. Often I run with my mind filled

with these images from Scripture

and the poems, the colors and the flights.

Most every day I write

something like this. Not important, not particularly

artistic, but a nexus between bird

and flower, metaphor, and Joshua’s trombones,

or Peter’s denial and often dream images

carried over from the night. All of this

I think of this as the discipline

of prayer and doxologies of morning. With the cadence

of the run, it forms a rhythm of its own

and takes on a complex linearity.

Tomorrow

I will sit with Pat

for 3 hours as she is injected through a port

with the poisons so necessary, ironically,

to sustain her life. She’s nearly bald now;

it is very hard; it saddens her, so it saddens me.

She will feel crappy for 5 days,

but miss no work.

Last night my 86 year old mother

had surgery to repair the hip broken

when a grandfather clock fell on her

on Tuesday in her home.

In the ICU of the same New Jersey hospital

my 88 year old uncle who lives with her

is recovering from Monday’s surgery

meant to repair

a blocked bowel. Next week I will drive

there, not sure how much time

I will need to spend. I will stop in

Annapolis to visit my niece, her husband,

and their 2 boys.

July 25, 2006

Secretary of dawns~~

I rise

to the flowers of morning

where coral bells secret

sweet

temptations

in butterfly domiciles

and double pink

impatiens

lure the transparent

winged damselfly

I am the secretary of dawns

in the heartland of sorrows

July 24, 2006

Sugar~~

Morning:

out with the petunias and poets past

the flight of bats

sadly

already

pre dawn clouds

dissipated

the early flowers of spring past

more showy

than those of mid summer

surpassed

though each day greets the exuberance

of yellow

lily and pursed butterfly

wings of white

rose: a leak of glory

into the summer’s pool

with morning came

a vision of a naked

woman split

disclosed by shed

hair

ambivalence in the hierarchy of beauty

intrigue of spoilt

innocence like

the tongue of an ant

so susceptible to sugar or bacon

fat, but joy…pleasure

is what we are made for

hardened I look

on the tumors

of the oak outside ready

to fall

July 23, 2006

Summer morning, Sunday,

mild, humid, slight refreshing

breeze, sitting out at dawn beneath

circling bats, watching tiny

primordial spiders shimmy

their invisible cords

inspiration to aspiring Wallendas,

reading the master of

the mystical lyric, his childhood

prayer:

I wake to light that warms

My eye

And feel almighty God

Nearby,

wondering.

Theodicy, the problem of evil,

suffering on such a grand scale

if God is so nearby, why?

The conundrum thought by some

to be blasphemy, to others proof

of the shush of God since Sinai

or shortly thereafter when Rahab

the whore was saved from the falling

walls and fires of Jericho where man,

woman, child and beast were slain

to adhere to the Word of this same God

called upon to shelter us from harm:

O God, make speed to save us;

O Lord, make haste to help us:

suffrages of evening.

Through the panes of the French

doors, radiant warmth of walls

the color of sun rise draped

with the seasons in Chinese, summer

night pictured hotter than sun rise,

a Chinese fishing boat on the Sichuan

River, cormorants perched on the bow,

auspicious as a parliament of rooks,

harbingers of death:

Among the twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

Then I rose to rub

a head not yet bald,

like peering in to a crystal ball,

and I could imagine in a world

without God a black Mustang GT,

cormorants diving for fish with no retrieve

around their necks,

but not rain, nor the mystical eye

of the blackbird.

July 21, 2006

Birds of the air...

Morning began with the psalms and W.S. Merwin…To the Corner of the Eye. The poem brought to mind Peter L. Berger’s A Rumor of Angels and the suggestion of Presence, tracers of the holy, the redemptive presence of a Christ

suffusing the empirical world. Joshua … ordered by the commander of the army of the Lord to remove his shoes;

he was on sacred ground, and so amidst the black-eyed Susans and as brown thrashers and red-bellied woodpeckers fed on the suet dough

I prayed

and in some small way re-sanctified again that little space beneath the blue canopy where I live…hope.

The hair remains the most discomfiting.

There is often the urge to tug on the back of the wig, to pull it down, to re-place it. It irritates the back of the head just above the nape around the occipital bone, that slight protrusion providentially provided as an anchor for a later day wig; the scalp, there, is reddened and rashy. It is hot. It is summer in Atlanta.

The wig…or its source, the hair loss…continues to be the cause of anger, the sign of the dis-ease. The hair doesn’t exactly fall out, in part because it has been sheared. Rather, it recedes in uneven patches. Thighs are smooth; calves still a bit stubbly, eye brows have thinned, lashes remain. You notice these small things, take account of them as if the proverbial birds of the air so attended to by the heavenly Father, and are we not of more value than they?

This is a reflection on that

which is

precious.

July 13, 2006

Images before Prayer~

Out at 4:30AM beneath a moon that’s nearly full, trying to find even a feeble metaphor to equate its light, its unlikely and alien lightness in the dark purple sky…satin spar or home to the Selenites mining beneath its pearlish surface. First half of night spent in wonderful world of dream, color and complexity, cold winter, and rugged red stone a son fell from while doing rainbow jumps down it, a mid Idaho landscape, vast wintry high desert of ice; he quivered on the cold ground; I froze on an edge of the rock. And they say it is a world of reason! And that preceded by the dream of sleeping with P on the floor of a friend’s home, 2 dogs, one black and our Lucy I hugged to me complaining of the noise, noisy sons we complained about, one of whom farted in the face of P; I shouted at him; waking on the floor of a shower at midnight with young people who returned from somewhere and were headed somewhere and showering in between. And this is a logical world that corresponds to the logical construction of the brain. It’s all a thought disorder and I am the insane one.

Greeted the yellows with flowery thoughts rooted in the Hegel’s “oyster-like, gray, or quite absolute black” of god or the mind, or what does it mean anyway? The moon is distant from the sea, / And yet with amber hands / She leads him, docile as a boy.

These are the images before the day is sanctified by the little implement of prayer, the uplift of language flung toward God. Though already, before even leaving the covers, I rubbed my lucky Fuzzy…still there, some.

July 11, 2006

Sitting at the white table~~

Walled in, I sit out

in the circle of supple light

bracketed by the yellow of wind

flowers visited by carpenter bees

stirring in my ear. Air

slightly scented by potted pink

of abelia, cardinals the color of salvia rattle

the boughs of the waxy leafed gardenias,

hedging the woods, already spent;

the space forms the velvet geography of prayer…

hide me under the shelter of your wings…

the psalmist’s plea in sun drenched desert,

landscape of the soul,

the secret bower of prayer,

a strange mystical warmth permeates

through the green as mosquitoes scuttle

the plans to pray out amongst the Zen of it.

Texture of a secure warmth, an accompanied

Silence; the rhythm of the birds’ flight

marks out a strange enchanting beauty,

a symmetry with the meter of the suffrages;

the rufous’ constant plea, Drink your tea,

as I sip the bitter of black coffee.

I am the chaplain of morning sorrows

taking up the offering of blind poets and the brown

thrasher, the head of an Ichabod,

plucking away at the suet dough,

head molted, distorted, as bald as my love

will be tomorrow, day six of treatment 2 of cycle 1.

Behind closed eyes, I lay my hands on that beloved

head and raise my plea, Be well for me, be well

for me.

July 7, 2006

I thought that pain meant

I was not loved.

It meant I loved.

And so the silence of morning

pierced by birdsong,

or is it the celestial music

of ravishing angels that heralds the day?

I glimpsed myself

in the blinking of an eye

a flame, a ravaging fire,

Elijah’s chariot drawn by horses of fire,

ascending

up into heaven: the meaning,

perhaps, of God, or the answer

to prayer: in this vision the uplift

from out of the mire into glory intended,

or perhaps it is the answer to nothing,

but is the fact of prayer…presence intensified,

oracular.

The perfect bright-yellow radii

of the head of the sunflower

splinters the dark morn, light

remembering its colors, its proper

nature that darkness cannot swallow up:

in morning’s shattered, though lambent light,

everything’s growing so lush,

space flower-filled, roses

stretching up into the canopy of dogwood.

How will it all fit in August? But

there’s this too to the day yet to come:

after the vision of fire, the face

soft and slightly mapped, the doctor

under whose direction the chemicals

will be administered: how fragile the earth;

how strange compassion under the aspect

of intelligence

melds to put off…some…

the loss of what has been loved:

how fragile the eternal

...the infinite.

July 2, 2006

My nude

My mother thinks my wife of 34 years is going to die,

The mother of my two sons.

I mean, the big picture is…my mother is right. She is still

Of the time when cancer was a precursor to death and death

Being the final insult, still, that it is makes cancer a secret…for shame,

For insult.

My wife is losing her hair…not at this moment dying…

What is left of it that I have not sheared.

Feelings about shearing one’s spouse and about the loss of hair,

And do I recommend you do it too, god forbid you have the opportunity:

The indignity of all the poking, prodding, injecting, lumpectomizing (x2),

Etc., etc., etc., do not equal the indignity of the loss

Of hair, I can

Tell you this…I am there…she is, emphatically.

But the shearing itself brings, oddly, a kind of posteriori

Masochistic satisfaction…or, there is no real satisfaction in it

Of any kind, but there is a fear of taking some delight

In participating in the spoiling of that for which you care.

The way it works is, you pretty much have to say, Now is the day

Because on the bathroom floor and in the sink…hair…and

It has been 14 days, and Monday is work and the work means

The wig, and we have to prepare it and for it.

And you do it, and thank god, really, in the morning she says,

My skin feels different. That’s the satisfaction: a relief

That you, that is I, didn’t just mutilate someone…something’s

Really going on in there. Then you say, god, I shouldn’t feel relief,

But you do not because something’s going on in there,

But because what you did was important, good, caring, and difficult.

It could have been done by Gary her hairdresser, or

It could have been done by David at the Women’s Store

At Northside Hospital where we purchased the wig.

It could have been done with great fanfare in the backyard

With sons, friends, wine and barbecued ribs.

But it was done in the kitchen alone except for a little

Beefeaters for each of us, and obscured mirrors for her

Until this morning. It was sad and tender and intimate

And ours…alone. There was neither pity, humor, nor small talk.

There were fantastic stuffed grilled hamburgers

Before hand to beef us up.

And now its done. And there was a walk along the river in scarf

And hat this morning…a coming out. And there was a returning

Home and shampooing the wig and getting it to fit right

And 2 or 3 hours of reassurance from a son and me; and there

Was going out to the market in the wig…a second coming

Out. And it is all okay, until Friday when the 2^nd treatment

In the 1^st cycle of chemotherapy is repeated: 3 hours of it,

Then back to work and feeling okay for a day or 2

Then, well some of it is our own, but on the day god said,

Let the waters be gathered together in one place,

And let there be dry land, that is on the 3^rd day, she will need rest,

For even god needed it after the 7th day and she is

Good, but she is not god.

I admit as well a certain titillation in seeing my hairless nude,

A little upturn of lips…a wink.