EASTER 2023

For Brian

“Resurrection” is a wondrous thing: a word. Being a word, its wonder resides in its having no need to be worshipped but enabling those humans who happen to be embedded with the need to worship to do so. My own embedded human needs - I lead a prayerful life but not a worshipful one - concern acknowledgement, curiosity, a surrender to science, the curative power of empathy, kindness, the senses, nature, the unseen seen world. “Resurrection,” that wondrous word, is but a redefining of existence. For me, mine is redefined each dawn, each incongruously new day, by The Light that never really leaves the (r)evolving world so it never has to return and be risen. (Language also gives us parenthetical concepts as well as meta ones, as this very sentence is each in its further explaining “resurrection,” which itself is both - indeed the Divine Both.) Look, life is not language. I know that. But language does give it a construct. Ritualizes it. Weaponizes, for some, their righteousness in order to wield it. But I choose to live in language’s incongruous wonder. I find redemption there. Can one be saved by a man who hung out with his own world’s outcasts who were demonized by the self-righteous, overly religious of his day and who was born of a virgin and who claimed to be the son of God and who was crucified for those claims and who then rose from the dead on the third day after his execution? I don’t know. But that’s some narrative and there is beauty to be found at times in the language that retells it, and retells it. And where there is narrative - where there is language -there is “hope,” another wondrous word, maybe the most wondrous. Just as humans are embedded with needs, “resurrection” is embedded with “hope.” We all just want to be hopeful. It is the one shared human need other than hunger and sleep and a productive visit to a bathroom: hope. We can even live without love, but not the hope for it.

In my waking-to-the-Light-and-language poetry meditation here in Paris this morning, I typed another word,"Easter," into the search bar at poetryfoundation.org and got this poem by Perry Janes.

NO THANKS

After W.S. Merwin, sort of

listen

every day the world is making its meager

mea culpas for Easter peeps arranged on dollar store plates

at dinner parties invisible fences the dogs run past

for bleach-stained laundry fresh from the laundromat

fallen palm leaves whose barbs bloody your fingers

when you sweep them from the road someone somewhere

is repenting listen it is every living creature’s right

to refuse the apology no thanks to the vendor

offering his rhinestone watch before the truck

can tow his trailer from the driveway I’m good

to the postwoman offering whiskey and who knows

where it could lead after misplacing another package yes

god it is good to decline the world its small expressions

of remorse the landlord’s handshake as black mold erupts

from the ceiling the gift basket and wax-armored cheese

after another job falls through the apology you once imagined

from the boy you last remember as a shape

standing over you naked the shape of all intent

as you have come to understand it a volition of dark

holy as any power you wrestle with and lose to can be

holy your neck craning up intending you swear

to reject that single word its rain

sorry

###

After reading that poem by Janes, I found these two poems by W.S. Merwin

DIVINITIES

Having crowded once onto the threshold of mortality

And not been chosen

There is no freedom such as theirs

That have no beginning

The air itself is their memory

A domain they cannot inhabit

But from which they are never absent

What are you they say that simply exist

And the heavens and the earth bow to them

Looking up from their choices

Perishing

All day and all night

Everything that is mistaken worships them

Even the dead sing them an unending hymn

SOMETHING I'VE NOT DONE

Something I’ve not done

is following me

I haven’t done it again and again

so it has many footsteps

like a drumstick that’s grown old and never been used

In late afternoon I hear it come closer

at times it climbs out of a sea

onto my shoulders

and I shrug it off

losing one more chance

Every morning

it’s drunk up part of my breath for the day

and knows which way

I’m going

and already it’s not done there

But once more I say I’ll lay hands on it

tomorrow

and add its footsteps to my heart

and its story to my regrets

and its silence to my compass

###

I had a close friend - I have one although he is now dead - who was from Iowa and a priest for a time, a young one beckoned to the Vatican to be mentored by an infamous rabidly conservative cardinal there. While in Rome, my friend, Brian, came out of the closet and finally left the priesthood which I think haunted him the rest of his life. He longed to find again what had found him in his vocation. But he felt, I felt, it had to be put aside in order for him to reside in the world as his truer self if not his truest. When I was on the train back to NYC from JFK a few years ago after one of my extended trips to London, I received a message on Facebook that Brian had died suddenly which I just always assumed was either from an overdose or a suicide. There is a fine line between them, a misplaced membrane much like the one through which life whispers to itself as we decide which side of it to call death.

During my morning prayers and meditations, I say Brian's name each day in a litany of names who could not survive on this side of that membrane. I came as close to being in love with him as I have with anyone else in my life. And, part of that, was because I was able to latch lasciviousness to it in a way I never knew love was able to do, a carnality that was not a cross to bear but a reverent revelation, ritual, another kind of chance to find righteousness within it.

Brian loved language.

His favorite poet was W.S. Merwin.

His silence now - his vocation - is my daily compass.

This is Easter to me.