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.

mercy corps

Mercy Corps: donate now to help us provide humanitarian relief items for families besieged by the military action in Gaza.



go to http://www.mercycorps.org/gazacrisis

my heart

must hurry

before i go. or i'll forget.


I am in an old western town, a ghost town. There is no one there. I come around one wooden sidewalk, look down another. I see, in my mind



ghosttown


there is no one on the wooden walkways
no one through the window dust
my boots only clacking the lifting panels

dreaming, i know, i see the dreaming sight within this dreaming
an iron gate, fillagreed, tiny arch welded to tiny arch,
waist to waist, armor
its hundred reflected lights
passing over cast details in sequence
just as light would
opening

not here

where then those flashes of gold
from where dreamt, learnt, meant

a spin of dust
into company
here now
her again

dreaming mind, I say, show me
-you can-
show me such specificity
as would turn me to dust

but she turns away
on the wooden walkway
her light hand
like a Sunday girl's
trailing on a rail

wherever i go
she turns from me
shy in death

i can only see the white sweater
the glint of a pale light on its pearls
the blue, the peach, the orange, the shape of the cast shadow
slant-dropped, lavender
a pass of softer color over
the gate that will not open
yet