A walk together

Note: I have a daily habit of writing poetry, a routine which goes back about ten years or so. Since Timm died on April 18 I've used the hour to write verse letters to Timm, accounting what little of our lives we shared, factoring his death into the day's toll, praising, grieving, taking some measure of Timm I never got around to while he lived. Those poems are sort of a personal underground to this memorial blog; many of them aren't appropriate for sharing here and may never see the light of any day. That conversation with Timm is personally important so I continue it, for however long my hand aches to write the lines across and down the page. (Note: I've used Timm's favorite pen for most of these poems, a heavy silverish pen, not really expensive but made for heavy handling.)

Anyway, the following poem is one I wrote earlier in the month and is partially about the strains Timm's death has put upon my daily life as well as praising a memory I have of Timm from the tiny box it shares with a few others. I hope it doesn't seem too indulgent. Poetry allows me to make of my personal experience something more common, even archetypal; they are more about the human condition, what we all contend with, than anything special to my experience.

The pictures are of Portland's river waterfront, where Timm and I walked one day together, and were found in Timm's digital archive.

***

A WALK TOGETHER

Yesterday -- recovering from a
heart cath procedure which dealt
a Fisher King-sized wound to my
groin in the name of discerning
how much bad heart you and I share --
I lay on the couch with your laptop,
keying in poems from this waterfall
of grief & searching for pictures to use
in future posts remembering your life.

(Me the healthy one who got all the tests
because you the truly suffering one
failed to get any of the right ones in time.)

The poems from this series are sluggish
vowel movements, whales which require
a lot of dead paper to swim the breadth
and depth of a grief that has infected
all else with a sense of morbid freefall.

My wife is feeling to too and dreads it,
is distracted, needs a vacation so,
bored to death with steel routines,
caged for too long with so
much grief and aging and death.

Hell, we're barely 50 and the horizon
already seems too bleak, an endless
Bataan march with Death blithely
picking off one or another beloved
nephew or sibling or cat or parent -- us too.

And I confess to feeling some
sort of morbid glee about it, the way
after 9/11 a sick part of me lusted to
hear more bad news, for life to
be writ large again and again by
big dying -- for ten more jets to take down
ten tall building in ten cities,
for anthrax to nail a population at
Epcot one too-sunlit afternoon,
annihilating every inch of perfectly bared flesh.

There is a usurious license of the imagination
to brood on melancholy's leaden fumes,
making the fancy of dread a carnival of souls
each falling from off high wire
with not a thread of net allowed below.

Zooey our old cat hasn't eaten
but a few bites in the past three days;
she's even thinner if there could be such
a thing, her calico fur covering only bones.
She's growing listless too though she
rallies now and then to eat when you
stand over her and pet her repeatedly,
cooing her name.

I hear my father's blood pressure is
through the roof and my mother doesn't
sleep or eat well on many days; my wife's
mother is getting iron transfusions once
a week and her father is frail, pale,
seems to remember less and less ...

When the phone rings there is fear and wonder
at just what bad news could be falling
next upon our house, on our
love, the rest of our lives.

And yet amid all that there's work to
do and plenty of it: Can't let the garden
or lawn go another week (so hot and
humid this weekend, I can hear everything
strain up in a virile shout); there's
a tower of labors waiting for me at work
(what with my assistant's husband just
diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she was
out all last week); -- oh and I need to find
a better job, we need more money, we
desperately need to get away on a vacation:
And then there's all of these too-long poems
to get typed in.

And all of your life to press into a legacy.

See, I'm hurrying already, when I meant to
linger on a memory of visiting you
in Portland back in 2002. I flew out
on Sept. 11, the one-year anniversary of
that archetypal bad news event, there
to attend an NNA convention and
trade show selling newspaper wares.

No problem getting a seat on a flight that day,
the air-lanes all eerily empty,
so many sure that the terrorists would
strike again while memorials were being
tolled at Ground Zero and the Pentagon
and that field in Pennyslvania where Flight 91
broke into a million pieces, valiantly short
of its target in Washington.

I watched the ceremonials at 9 a.m. while
waiting to board my connection in Dallas,
having called my wife to swear everything
was OK, everyone in the terminal eyeing each
other, wondering, thrilled, terrified, praying
hard or eating everything in sight. Flying to
Portland aboard a missile of jet fuel and
human shrapnel reading Moby Dick,
the threat of global terrorism in that white
whale--no, in the black melancholy ship
the Pequod with an egoist on the poop deck,
Ahab bin Laden with a peg leg and
a towering resentment glowing on his harpoon.

The Portland airport was empty -- so much
elbow room that day that it proved the
most pleasant day of air travel I ever
experienced, nothing like the choked
miasmas of today's airlines, nearly bankrupt
from 9/11 and the cost of added security
and now high jet fuel costs fueled by our
war on global terrorism. Remember when
you flew down for your nephew's funeral
last year, how much United screwed up
with mechanical troubles and vast delays?
That's a current legacy of that old bad news,
the worse stuff that comes after the
hurricane's big frontal winds.

I recall how beautiful Portland was that late
summer day I taxied in, clean streets,
trees in early autumn fire, a coffee shop
on every block, Mount Hood the distance
still with a few traces of snow. Your neck
of the woods, the home you chose and made
so far from ours. Me and the rest of the
family wondered if you were hiding from
us out there, living out your secret life,
far from our sight if not our judgment.

But I found none of that in our two
nights together during the conference,
just a younger brother who'd grown up.
You would have been 38 that year and
you entered the hotel lobby where I waited
smiling and tall, your face full and round,
flecks of grey already in your hair.

We walked downtown streets talking of
jobs and loves and craft and AA,
you on my left because your right ear
was the good one (the nerves to your
other ear were severed in that near-fatal
car crash in '81), the two of us not
identical but of the same lumbering gait,
our steps in such easy harmony together
that I came to believe right then that
we were twins of an order, neither identical
or even of the same birth but cut from
much of the same genetic cloth, the
the way we can say we with poetry verity
we share our father's old gaelic name
when there's scant biology left to prove it.

We ate the first night at an expensive
fish and chop house on my company dime,
oysters air-freighted in from afar, hunks
of steaming salmon from the Oregon coast,
massive wedges of key-lime pie
and tiny cups of expresso,
the restaraunt's dark interior a drinker's
paradise though we relished everything
without a single drop of booze.

I talked of my 6-year fall back into the bottle
and recent recovery, accounting all the wrongs
I'd done my wife, a much humbler man
now, just three months back at home,
desperate to make full amends. You
talked about your work at the newspapers
as a part-time journo and photographer,
about your girlfriend or lack of one -- I
can't recall -- about attending AA through
your church & wanting so to make a go
as a photographer though then as ever
it was hit-and-miss, two steps forward
with a freelance job, one or two steps back
because of a dead end or a debt.

We listened and laughed and nodded
as we told our independent stories -- lives
lived completely apart -- amazed at
the comfort we felt in talking to each
other when we'd hardly spoken in 20 years.
I think it was that trip in which I grew
convinced we were sames, identicals
of some arc of life which caused us
to live the same way so far apart.

The next afternoon after the day's
trade-show shift (not well attended, no
real business done with passing publishers
and editors -- though it was fun searching
for your photos in the newspaper contest
display -- ), we ate then walked down by the river,
checking out art galleries and drinking
coffee, less to say or prove, just enjoying
the other like a well-worn pair of shoes
we didn't know we had.

At least that's the way I felt. Was your
confident adulthood just a show for me,
a message to be sent back to the family
that all was well? Were there resentments
that you still felt toward me, the older brother
who never was much of one while you
were growing up, separated forever by
years and miles and degrees of faith
and permanence of love?

If you did have those resentments, you
were mum about them on that visit
and I never later heard you speak of them.
But then you were a private man, your
deepest truths hidden even from you.
Perhaps you'd grown indifferent, having
lived furthest apart, your home simply
not ours to share, located a continent
away from all semblance of the old family.

But my visit in 2002 made clear to me another
reason for your distance I had before
considered: that Oregon was bliss compared
to the superheated and overdeveloped
'burbs of Florida you'd fled from years before.
Portland proved a city that was as dear to its
people as Oregon's rolling countryside.
Who wouldn't choose to live there?
Of course you did.

So your distance was tempered by
more practical truths. I left the next day
feeling that we could be close brothers
even at distances so great we would
rarely again see each other which proved
true, especially now. I flew back out of
Portland headed to my newly refound
home, watching Mount Hood in the window --
majestic, proud, loud against the rolling
tableaux of Oregon -- a testament to
who you had become on your own
far from our distant view.

Six years later when I flew back into Portland
the day you died it was dark and clouded,
my window on the crammed flight streaked
with rain: Mount Hood was invisible,
inscrutable as a monk vowed to silence,
hiding the life you'd made which your own heart
took away. Even so you were everywhere:
so much in the talk of friends and love
and choir members and co-workers,
present in all your stuff, your apartment
filled with muddy shoes and thousands
of slides, your guitar in its case, your
closets crammed with old clothes,
your laptop and expensive camera in
a backpack on the floor, your truck
parked outside with a mountain bike on
the rack, your silver pen which I hold
now in my hand, writing these letters to you.

You everywhere and nowhere as we
closed down your life, packing stuff up,
returning your truck to the credit union,
shipping your body off for cremation,
carrying back your ashes in an urn.
I can still feel the pavement in Portland
as we walked and talked for hours that
still-warm late afternoon in September,
step after step in easy perfect rhythm,
identical, me feeling so proud of you,
of the world you had chosen and made,
happy we had so many years left as brothers.

Canopies of elm and oak turning red
and gold over our heads, the soft
saturate light of the dusk absorbing
us, our talk, our steps, the Willamette
river flowing on ahead of us, bearing
fates which are dark to us, seem darkest
to us these days.

But I just may be infected with dreams
we reveled in together even though
we doubted them, even though
they never quite came true.
Perhaps the pacing was all -- right?
Those perfectly matched steps as we took
a late walk together. That's why these poems
are so long, hy I just can't bring
myself to end them though I know I must.

You had just begun the true work of
the real life, bro, there's so much more
of it to do and nothing survives the effort
but the sound of two sets of steps in unision.
I trust we'll keep on walking somehow together
through all the doors yet to come. And look:
Zooey's now eating at her dish, taking
nourishment from what is there. Are you
bending over her in the dining room,
whispering There There, what she loves
most to hear? I'll take that bit of good news
as an oar to row off from the current tide
where so much bad news is crowing falsely in my ear,
with so many hours left in the day to ride.