September Fifteenth, September Fifteenth

Lost brother, this morning the moon
is full and leans heavily toward your west,
spreading pale whiteness across my yard
and garden like a pall or spell. Or both:

A bittersweet thrall of light which holds
you and I together in its membrane,
in this silver womb we forever share.

Great loss has this whole lining, we know,
raining evanescent grace over us
exactly where we’re hurt the worst.

Serenely it plays that lonely guitar
you and I both loved and yearned for
in a Pat Matheny song we first heard
in the autumn of 1981 and both loved since,

a music now almost three decades
out there on the radio waves which sail
our dreams among the stars.

This moonlight’s on your mountain
where you stood surveying your past
wondering where you might go next;

this moonlight’s on the chapel
where your final footprints are dust,
weakly lamping the stone which
covers your face forever with

the three signs of passage --
a singing dolphin, a cross and
a stone gate, harrows all of heart.

Moonlight glows on stones everywhere
tonight with a lucenct ache
which to us is utterly serene,

a greeting, perhaps, from the heart
we are forever seeking when we love,
when we pray, when we play that song.

You are so inside that music now
you may no longer know
the ache I feel for it and you today,
brother, the burden of the moon,
heavy with greif and so in love
with the beauty of the world you
once photographed with ease.

The fact of that ache is lost to you
now, brother, the augment of
history’s pain: but the peace

no longer haunts you like moonlight
silvering a dark garden
but is the element you are free in,

the heavenly third sea
we always dreamt of swimming in,
the final torpe of all poetry,
the kiss we always yearned for.

On this September 15 I remember our song
and say that we compose its harmony
with our lives and complete it
only when we let it go, singing

and sighing like that blue guitar
in that old Pat Matheny song,
becoming moons ourselves,

mirrors naked of all but that pure longing
in which our God now fullest glows.

The garden in the front yard of my house in Mt.Dora, in imagined moonlight.

The St. Columba Chapel at Columcille in Pennsylvania, where Timm's ashes are interred. Dad's ashes will eventually join his crypt in the chapel floor.

This day is a complex anniversary for me. It marks a date in my emotional history when heartbreak proved a true door for growth -- the day, on Sept. 15, 1981 -- when a woman I had fallen in love with told me to never see her again.

The song of that season was "September 15" by the Pat Matheny Group, on their album As Witchita Falls, So Falls Witchita. Something in the mood of the song so matched my grief -- a bittersweet gorgeousness, so in love and so wounded -- that it became an anthem of sorts.

Timm and I in 1981.

While I was suffering so, Timm was wounded in a much more dramatic and mortal fashion, nearly dying of his injuries from a car accident near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he had been working on a ranch. While I was learning some essentinal things about the heart, Timm was learning some essential things about near-death and the serenity of God which is deepest in the mortal heart.

The VW bug Timm was riding in when his near-fatal accident occurred in 1981.

Every Sept. 15 in the years following has been a personal holiday, something akin, I guess, to 09/11; I'd remember that emotional crash-and-burn, the tone and tenor of the time, the aching search for real connection which eventually led to sobriety and therapy and recovery and marriage. Deepest in that celebration was some tolling of the bell for beauty, for rapture and love and possibility; the song "September 15" captured in music what I yearned for.

I found out that the song was actually written by keyboardist Lyle Mays, for the legendary jazz pianist Bill Evans, who died on Sept. 15 1980. Learning that led me to discover Bill Evans' recordings, which I have by now collected most of them. The lush, accomplished, gorgeous trellis of piano chords Evans' builds is something holy, to me, holding in their quiet aggregation some infinity of longing.

That sense of longing Timm felt too. He also loved "September 15." He had the sheet music for the guitar parts. He listened to the song on his laptop on the last day of his life. It was perhaps the music deepest in his heart; perhaps it was calling the distance as he died.

Timm and I in 2007.

We share that song, and Timm is now in the pew of the chapel I go to every September 15, giving thanks for this heart which can feel, which gets so wounded, longs so, yearns for the impossible, is astounded by the beauty and grace in this world, in my wife as she turns in her sleep, in our new kittens Belle and Hugo as they curl into each other near in the window.

Belle and Hugo.

A roadside memorial I pass every day on the way to work. Almost all of it has faded, but you can still make out "RIP Brother" on the guardrail.

I've posted this before, but this is Timm's tale of his accident in 1981, and of the "haunting" sense of serenity which frames his memory of it -- a serenity, I pray, was with him on April 18, 2008.

***

Haunted by Peace

Timm O'Cobhthaigh

June 2003

It was an October night in 1981 that the haunting first began. The moon had not yet risen over the mountains that surrounded the town of Jackson, Wyoming when I stuck my thumb out, trying to get a ride home. The movie I just came from left a smile on my face, a welcome diversion after a day of job-hunitng.

A Volkswagon Beetle lumbered up to me and, peering through the windshield, I recognized the occupants from the apartment building we both lived in.
I sat in the backseat, leaning against the side, lulled into a light sleep by the humming engine when it happened.

It was days later when I finally got the full story: a large pick-up had pulled out in front of us when we were doing 60 m.p.h. making the impact inevitable. The driver and the passenger in the front of the Bug were trapped in the mangled mess while I had been ejected, flying 20 yards before hitting the grassy shoulder. The other driver walked away from the incident with a couple of scratches.

A few hours later I was aware of a hard table beneath me, a strong odor of disinfectant and the sound of somebody screaming. I opened my eyes but shut them quickly since the lights above me hurt. People bustled around me but I didn't know what they were doing. My mind a fog, but slowly the realization dawned on me that we had been in an accident.

Somebody was touching my head and another approached the table.

"Is he going to make it doctor?" the newcomer asked the one probing my scalp.
No reply at first, just the gentle probing. Finally the doctor stopped, sighed and responded.

"No, I doubt he'll make it thru the night."

I'm dying. My life didn't flash before my eyes, nor was there a series of regret.

In fact, what I felt surprised me: peace.

It was unlike anything else I'd ever experienced. It surrounded me, enveloping me in a protective cocoon that nothing could touch. The horror of dying at 18, cut down prior to living my life down just didn't matter. Live or die I didn't care. I was beyond caring. I was in that peace.

Later that night I was airlifted 500 miles to Salt Lake City and, contrary to the doctor's prognosis, I lived. But something was different. Eventually I pieced together what had happened, even the last-second screeching of brakes, but what I remembered most was the peace.

I have taken time alone with God every morning since I was in my mid-teens, praying and reading my Bible. It was my way of preparing for the day - getting my head and heart in line with God. It was a few weeks after the accident when I was finally able to do this ritual and then it was there again. The peace. Nowhere near as strong as the night of the accident, but it was the same.

I remembered that night and that incredible peace. I wasn't completely sure what it was all about, I just knew that I never wanted to be separated from it. I was beyond hurting when I was there, enveloped in His presence and here it was again.

My morning devotions took on a whole new meaning as I realized the more I cultivated an intimate relationship with God the more I sensed His present peace.

Before long I noticed it in other places also. Walking in the woods I would be surrounded by it; worshiping, whether in church or alone it was there, and any time I would stop long enough to reconnect with God, there it would be.
It's a wonderful gift, available to everyone. Often appearing as a phantom - unable to physically grasp or manipulate, but when I let go it is there.

He is there.

He is here.

His memory haunts me.



And finally, this poem by Bill Zavatsky for Bill Evans, who was also elegized in "September Fifteenth, the subject of this post. The poem appears in the liner notes for Evans' wonderful album You Must Believe in Spring, which I do, I do, I do...

Elegy (For Bill Evans, 1929-1980)

Music your hands are no longer here to make
Still breaks against my ear, still shakes my heart.
Then I feel that I am still before you.
You bend above your shadow on the keys
That tremble at your touch or crystallize,
Water forced to concentrate. In meditation
You close your eyes to see yourself more clearly.

Now you know the source of sound,
The element bone and muscle penetrate
Hoping to bring back beauty.
Hoping to catch what lies beyond our reach,
You hunted with your fingertips.

My life you found, and many other lives
Which traveled through your hands upon their journey.
Note by note we followed in your tracks, like
Hearing the rain, eyes closed to feel more deeply.
We stood before the mountains of your touch.
The sunlight and the shade you carried us
We drank, tasting our bitter lives more sweetly
From the spring of song that never stops its kiss.