The Sound of the Sea

(Note: this poem is from a series of poems
or letters I --David, Timm's brother -- have
been writing to Timm since his death.
This one was composed on April 28.)

Long ago -- toward the bottom of
the silo of memory which sings in me --
I sat by the sea, entranced at the sound
of its voice blent with our mother’s
as she stood over me, womb to womb
merged in my thrall as I cried Yes ...

That’s my myth, bro, the art chapelled
in my heart’s conch set next to the sea,
a bliss of gorgeous sight and sound,
curved blue waves of Thou tiding my name.

And it really happened, at least the
scene has a sea-tang of authentic
history to it. I have the pictures to
prove it -- me at two or three sitting
in a wagon with our brother Will
on a brilliant white beach, smiling
up at the Photographer -- our mother --

Cape Cod I think. There’s another
where I’m younger, a fat baby
sitting on the beach next to the
water eating shovels of wet sand,
devouring all that motherly receipt,
happy and blonde with a red
birthmark of an arrow-pierced heart
on my chest in the whiteout of light.

No picture survives of what I remember
most, that of my mother standing over
me looking out to sea. Her voice --
talking or singing to me -- is one in
those choiring waves. I was too
young to hold any camera though
the image is fixed in my deepest
memory of bliss. It may be too deep
an image even for historic truth,

but the trope is real and my love of the
world’s infinite beauty births and
swims there, is the altar for my every
love-the-world poem, benedictions
of the sea which I refrain
in the written sursurrations of tiding sound,
et cetera et cetera,
ad nauseum,
ad infinitum,
amen.

I broke down again yesterday
as I sat at your laptop
playing your favorite iTunes --
the top three being “Forgiven”
by Chris Botti and “Benedictus”
by Hayley Westenra and “Gaugin’s
Dream” by Jeff Johnson --:
Achingly beautiful tunes and you
on the laptop screensaver
walking in silhouette across
the shores of the Pacific at
at sunset.

Too much, your heart for beauty
so identical in mine, our DNA
pouring the same clear blue water
through our ears and eyes as
we reached back up to cup it in wonder
and feed the starved world,
nursing the paps of wonder
where they are found in this world,
through what craft we cobbled together
between the heavy hammers of life.

We had the same mother but you
left her long ago and hardly looked
back until your last years,
rarely sending cards or presents
for Mother’s Day on her birthday,
for whatever reasons of soul or
psyche or bad history turning
your eyes away from those Atlantic
shores she so loved ... And yet
you ended up exactly there,
on shores at the other end of the world,
building over time the same chapel,
only deep in the wild uterals
of Oregon. Finding on mountains,
in flowered valleys, down booming
western shores that which is most
intimate to me, and, I suspect, to her.

And why not? We came from
the same earthly womb;
and yet our personal mother is only
part of this story, as our history
in the world with so many wounded
beginnings and false starts and
errant turns. Our miseries
and pathologies and wounds
surely compose a case history
but are not the complicate and
consummating myth with its
worlds-comprehending visceral
whole ensouled wombed wave-wrack
that is that voice deepest in us
shouting Yes! and Yes! and Yes!,
ever-devoted, still-unrequited,
the ever-lovin’ soldier of bliss.

Beloved world indeed, infinite womb,
paps of glory bursting with milk
which we receive and pour back:
That aesthetic of beauty is ours, bro,
and that’s what I grieved hardest
listening to the music you played most
often, finding out, too late, that
you crusaded for it like I do,
soulmates in love with the heart
which yearns to reunite with the divine.

“Benedictus,” which was played
at your memorial, is close to the music
my wife picked out for her nephew’s funeral
nine years ago -- dead from driving
too fast at aged 19 -- Gluck’s
Plaint d’Orphee (“Orpheus’ Lament”)
from the ballet Orpheus and Eurydice,
a music which sang so purely of
that double loss which comes from loving
and then failing to return it from the grave,
a farewelling whisper of lost bliss
when the shade slips from our grasp,

never to be returned to these
mortal fingers again. Infinite eternal
harmonies are found in that wound,
am I right bro, gorgeous agonies we
compose again and again and again,
trying to get back into the womb.

O it’s futile and the register of what
little we can actually do is the mythos
of song, a horn of plenty coming out
of that eternal distance between I and Thou,
if you take the haunting magnitude
of “Benedictus” as evidence.

You loved that music so much that you
wanted to conduct your church
choir as they sang it, so moved
by the composition that you
had right to conduct it, if not
the source then its dolphin rider,
that naked man aboard the fish atop
our paternal family crest who
sings the three cups of laughter
and praise and sleep.

Curving the air with your hands
as the world choirs Yes with O-mouths,
summing in full the heart’s longing
for God here, on this morning 2,500
miles away from where you intended
to have it performed, under
conditions far different than
the one you imagined.

“Benedictus” indeed. I cried and
cried in deep wracking sobs
as that music played, watching you
walk on that infinite shore forever,
the sun returning to the ocean
we were born from,
taking you forever away.

O brother Orpheus you tried you tried
you tried yet failed to bring her back
with your beautiful heart-longing song,
your craft: but what songs of presence
live on in your beautiful photos, in
all the poems I’ve yet to write!

At 5 a.m. it’s so dark and the
garden chirrs invisibly outside the window,
a gathering moon painting faint blue
on the trellises of matin, this
orison to God thick with the dark
hues of loss and love and beauty,
your world, ours, the Yes which gives
birth even in death.

Traces of you, brother, my Orpheus,
are here, naive and simple
and native and natural, our old cat
Zooey breakfasted on her favorite tuna
and sleeping now down at my feet,
plants everywhere around this
world winging the wilderness inside,
my wife abed upstairs wounded too
by all this, the one in whom I am
planted and grow like the garden
which you learned how to take
such perfect pictures of.

“You are gone but I remain/
to sing the river’s song” : I wrote
those lines 30 years ago in my
own Western vigil, deciding to
love and sing even if my beloved
would never be found again, and
by so singing finding her
deep in the sound of the Spokane
river in spring, the myths of
the beloved roaring in
awakened water, snowmelt
pouring in cascades over the falls,
headed for that far-westernmost shore
where you walk forever now, our
Yes arising from our twinned
and forever separated hearts.

We just carry the cups awhile,
don’t we bro, failed drinkers
(who can ever drink the ocean in full?)
but journeyman pourers, watering
every shore of the world with that
womb water we need most.
Let’s give thanks to our mother
for the gift of the sound of the sea
still in our ears, silvery blue
and flowing deep in her heart,
in our hearts, in the art of that sound
we give back in full lest we drown
in the beauty. You nursed in full on it,
bro, and gave back the sea to me.