The Cemetery

Step into the light poor Lazarus/Don't die alone behind the window shade/

Let me see the mark death made/I dream a highway back to you

-Gillian Welch

Bowled over lately by the unfine-ness of things, I take to wandering the cemetery in the melting light, a mug of milky tea in hand and a nip of bourbon in the pocket of my spring blue coat.

There are lots of Katherines and Catherines there. Some Katies and Kitties but few Kates. On good days I make sure to visit my favorites: Ms. Peach Wayland, The Meachem Family, Agnes Plum, Stonewall Jackson Kerns and his son, Adelbert Jackson Kearns. On bad days I consider laying down amongst the McCathran clan until the damp green ground of their plot accepts the persistent weight of my tired bones.

Today is neither good nor bad, though, so I sit on the slope of the far hill and watch the birds peck at things I can not see. An old man follows his dog along the muddy path below and when he looks up and sees me, doffs his cap with a sweeping bow.  I touched three dead bodies this week I say aloud to the birds. Three men who were alive one minute and then not alive the next. I think of everything it means to be dead and then I think of all the ways to be dead while you are alive and the way to come back to life, which requires another kind of dying, too.  In my notebook I write DEAD in all capital letters and below it

CHERRYRED UNWED INBRED SOFABED WIDESPREAD TALKINGHEAD

which makes me laugh aloud to myself. Underneath my rhyme I sketch crude outlines of headstones and fill them in with my best gothic handwriting:

KATE

who tried her best to be kind

to drunks & addicts

who pissed on the floor & her shoes

or

Here lies KATE

who believed in

at least 100 second chances

or even just

KATE

who was usually on time

but is now truly late.

I sit on the side of the hill until I hear the bells from the church down the road. Long after their carolling ends, their message floats over the acres of graves. I sit as still as I can in the near dark and listen. Let the dead bury the dead. Go back to your living.  And for heaven's sake, be thankful you were not named for a Civil War general.

The Healing of that Old Ache

"In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you--the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence: the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves: the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things--the beauty, the memory of our own past--are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be re-united with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache."


C.S. Lewis 
The Weight of Glory

faith, hope, and jungle cats

Oh, but Kate! A tiger doesn't change his stripes! my father says.  He says this because it is mostly true and because he is my father and its his job.

And yet...my Father also says The lion shall lay down with the lamb which is also true and so beautiful a promise, and real, that I am able somehow to step outside myself and continue believing that there is nothing better than this feral, ferocious love and that it is my job to share it.

(Yes, I know that the the real verse is about wolves and leopards.)

Nothing Changes/On New Year's Day

My expectations for 2012 are pretty low. I'm open to surprises, though.

thirty

I cried for the three days beforehand then looked around my life threw away the clutter made peace

once and for all with every moment each decision that led me to this place.

But walking away from you stepping out of the cold wordless morning into an anemic beam of winter light I see how this was really only child's play;

that the next thirty years at least and then probably the thirty after that will be the long hard work

of learning to live peaceably and wisely among other people's choices and the

nothing and everything

they've to do with me.

Bows in arabesque.

Pristine naked loneliness

And branches like scythes.

Misgivings

William Matthews

"Perhaps you'll tire of me," muses

my love although she's like a great city

to me, or a park that finds new

ways to wear each flounce of light

and investiture of weather.

Soil doesn't tire of rain, I think,

but I know what she fears: plans warp,

planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away

by floods. And worse than what we can't

control is what we could: those drab,

scuttled marriages we shed so

gratefully may augur we're on our own

for good reasons. "Hi, honey," chirps Dread

when I come through the door, "you're home."

Experience is a great teacher

of the value of experience,

its claustrophobic prudence,

its gloomy name-the-disasters-

in-advance charisma. Listen,

my wary one, it's far too late

to unlove each other. Instead let's cook

something elaborate and not

invite anyone to share it but eat it

all up very very slowly.