After and Because of This

A painting I thought I'd lost, dedicated to a friend I wish I hadn't.
In Memory of John Collum of Oxford and Cape Town - a truly beautiful man.

I didn't know why I named the painting this - except for how it looked - but after he took it with him to South Africa, after a brief, but most sympathetic meeting and friendship, at some pinnacle of midlife youth and hope, we each experienced tremendous obliteration - his, much more physical, after surviving a horrible car accident in which his skull was broken in 29 places. With incredible bravery and will, John taught himself, from the beginning, from just sound formation, to make and use language again. A long, long road.

Not long after, he, too, was swept away.
So for this weekend, which at least symbolically is the end of an era of endurance, loss and forgetting... all that caring, all that caring, here's Stanley K. "The Long Boat".

When his boat snapped loose
from its mooring, under
the screaking of the gulls,
he tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore,
but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.
Too tired even to choose
between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:
conscience, ambition, and all
that caring.
He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle,
buffeted by the storm,
endlessly drifting.
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn't matter
which way was home;
as if he didn't know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.


I will endeavor to turn the painting upside down in my mind, to head the other direction, to love more those things I do, as I do, as that's all I can do.