Adventuring

The photo above accompanies the following tale that Mom relates (it originally appeared in a comment to Timm's "birthday letter" here on May 4). In fact, the picture, she thinks, was taken a short while before her story begins. "... One of my favorite memories of Timm was when he used a broom handle to push open the lock on the front screen porch. He took his first adventure (of many more to come) walking down Church Street towards a very busy highway. His travels were interrupted by a kind lady who lured him into her home with the offer of cookies. Whereupon, she called the police and Timm returned home in a police cruiser. Timm is truly home now and his adventures and travels far exceed any he had while here on earth. Good way to go, Timm ... "

Good way to remember Timm, Mom. Hearing that story reminded me of one of my own, and the next day I wrote the following poem in response. I make it public today.


ADVENTURING

May 6, 2008

In a comment on your memorial blog
Mother wrote of you wandering off
down Church Street in Evanston at
aged 3 or so, adventuring so far as to
cross busy Ridge Avenue and then
knocking on the door of a house
to ask some old lady to use her
bathroom. She led you to the loo,
fed you cookies & called the cops,
sending you home in a police cruiser.

Did that really happen to you too
or has our mother confused our stories
-- the same thing happened to me
at that age -- grafting your
childhood onto mine?

Either way I suppose we’re twins,
by nature or nurture, history or mystery;
the acorn seed we were born grew
much the same oak, in all its wild
so wounded and wondrous perplexity.
Our life arcs are so similar that I
wonder today if we’re reunited
here at last, my work yours,
completing each other here ...

Or maybe that’s just a compelling
device for writing the next poem.
It’s dangerous to conflate a tale
from childhood into a myth,
identifying one’s own history with
the god’s own mystery, suffering
through an infinite number of
trope-a-dopes aboard our
family’s archetypally blue fish

which is hardly ours anyway,
an accident of the years,
our paternal great-grandfather
O’Reilly losing his name when
he ran off (or was ran off by some
shotgun-affrighting ur-Daddy)
when he got our greatgrandma preggers.

Accidents happen too in the womb;
it’s known now that successive siblings
carry bits of DNA left over from previous
occupants of the womb: all of us kids
share the same love of music -- listening
to it or playing it ourselves; we all
love a good image and all try to take
pictures; three of us write (or wrote) well;
each of us has taken these loves and
amplified them in different ways.

But did you mine my lode from the
womb most, so that our histories -- albeit
separated so thoroughly as to make
them disjunct -- had identical trajectories,
both of us guitar players, both of us
travelling West, both choosing the
wrong first wife with a family already in
place, both sobering up and trying
to stay that way, both becoming
dedicated composers, serious enough
about a craft as to dive into its deeper end.

I know enough about Photoshop to see
how much more of it you practiced than
I’ll ever learn, working with those
20-meg RAW images, all the settings
and calibrations and masks and layers
that went into your images. Such a
whale of an effort behind those tiny flowers,
flukes identical in amplitude to the
way I’ve written here, day after day,
year after year, calibrating the heart’s
infinite degrees with savagely sweet sounds.

Each of us devotees to a big music
we so surrendered to--how could we not,
given the sweetness of the world’s sounds?--
--believing, as you once wrote on the
back of your photo greeting cards, that beauty heals.

Indeed it does: Though it will make you
miserable first, hounding the apprentice
devotee with so many humiliating
errors of practice, wounding so us so
deeply with the astounding discovery
that no image or word will ever
quite capture the full beauty of the world
though we try, though we try,
over and over til the effort -- or us -- die.

Right bro? Always so much to
reveal and revel in yet so little time,
never enough to finish the present sortie
before the next lifts her blue knickers,
smiling and smiling for us, sighing
This Way To God --. We leave a huge
blue streak behind and down from
the task, beleaguered by all of the
failures and deadlines in the real life,
hampered too by too much zeal
for this inwarding life, poorly managing
its balance against the outer one.

A lawyer told Dad to write “Deceased”
on all of your bills and send them back:
Death is a rapacious enough creditor
though it absolves us of our earthly
crimes and debts, taking, perhaps, the
measure of soul we built up and minted
as coins for passage, determining by
the heft and gleam of soul’s gold how
far into oblivion we pass, will fade.

The gorgeous trove of images you left
behind has me in a tug of war with
that underworld dude, keeping you alive
in ways which haunt and afflict me,
yes, but also keeps me alive, raring
to sing you in full amplitude to the sound
you were enthralled with, that gorgeous
sea music I too have heard and
know in my deepest bones.

When you wandered off that primal
childhood day, what were you seeking?
Adventure? A way out? Milky receipts
you needed more than home itself?
Whatever the case, you travelled so far
we should have lost you that day
or could have, just the way in later years
you almost died wandering the mountains of
Wyoming at 18 and did die by heart attack
at age 44 perched on the far-western
shores of our world, walking and talking
with God about beauty with your camera.

There’s no little old lady now to answer
the door and feed you cookies & call
the cops; no cruiser to ferry you home.
Maybe back then you never meant to come
home, sheepish and alone: just needed to pee.
That’s all I needed in the tale I only
thought my own, Paula the girl down the
street leading me into the woods to look for
worms, the two of us wandering so
far we crossed over a highway.

In both of our stories we ended up knocking
on some door too far from home. That I
think is a perfect mythologem for the
lover of beauty: he who seeks Eurydice,
lost bride, perfection we once knew in one
kiss on all distant shores, singing all the way.

Last night I dreamed of cleaning up
your house in a hurry, trying to decide
what to keep and what to throw away
as some ineffable clock ticked down
to the midnight hour you died.
There were huge piles of magazines
in an attic -- shutterbug and nature
mags mixed in with porn; I rummaged
through all of them, trying to decide
who you were, who I am, what to save,
what to trash.

At the dream's end the Latin
word consummatum (“finished”)
was as big on my tongue as it felt
whispered in my ear, stretched out
like a long blue wave rolling in from
some distant land, the dream crashing
a tiny tide of bum relics -- tools, manuals
for software no longer relevant, meds
which didn’t keep you alive and may
have even killed you -- into my ear
and onto my tongue. Consummatum
your ghostly voice at the door,
begging entrance, whispering of a
story from long long ago
where we both left home to travel here.

Smoke whiffs in the air this morning,
it’s wildfire season, rainless days turning
the lawns brown, the sun almost
ferally bright in the sky, lengthening
your shadow as I desperately row out
on this tide of poems grieving and
welcoming you, bro. When will this
work finish? Probably when my heart
at last has to pee and knocks on the last door.

Timm in 2002 or so, at age 38. Note the reappearance of the curly locks.