Legends of Old

Back to Florida and home and all the work of the grounded life -- a life I see Timm believing devoutly in, too, yet only beginning to enter: staying put, building the relationship he would plant himself into for the rest of a much-longer life than he ended up getting.

It's still quite warm here in Florida at this hour of the year but the beginnings and ends of the day are dark and cool-ish, brooding down, slowly entering the season of transformation. Yesterday my wife and I celebrated our twelfth anniversary by driving into Orlando to look at kitchen designs at Ikea (some day ahead we'll be able to afford it!) and finishing with dinner at our favorite restaurant Coq au Vin. We talked over our meal about house projects to accomplish near and far, money, dream jobs (she in her embroidery business full-time, me in a better-paying marketing job), fears of the economy, anger at Wall Street and Washington.

Beth and I had a private marriage ceremony -- a secret swearing, so to speak -- in the St. Columba chapel when we were up for Will's wedding in May 1996. A secret, sacred ceremony, which no one else has known about til now: We stood together by the center stone of the chapel, held hands, both touching the stone with our other hands, and vowed: I will love you forever. We spent most of our wedding funds on rings designed by a jeweler in Winter Park-believing, as we still do, in investing in what lasts the longest -- Celtic whorls on pure gold.

Interior of the St. Columba chapel, shot by Timm in April 2007.

My ring has an inscription on the inner band which reads, "By the rock of St. Columba sworn." That may a bit paradoxical, since St. Oran is the rock of St. Columba, planted in the footers of the abbey of Iona in 563 A.D. to appease the island's original water being. A bit shaky ground for such an orthodox structure to be raised, blending pagan and Christian myth, but quite vital and enduring ... exactly the way I see our marriage.

Exterior of the St. Columba chapel, also shot by Timm in '07.

Timm was there in '96 for brother Will's wedding, with his wife Mik; whatever was going on between them was mostly silent though apparently it was not well from the start. Their marriage would suffer on for a few years and then ended, as my first marriage had ended.

A photo from outside the St. Columba chapel in May 1996 when Will and Sarah (center) were married. Timm and Mik are to my father's left; that's me and Beth to his right. Mom and sister Molly are right behind Will and Sarah.

Will's marriage to Sarah, happily, has endured for these twelve years; he and she have wonderful house in East Bangor which Will has put some enormous work into, massively renovating the house, laying in an astonishing garden in back and building a stone wall around the front.

Brother Will showing his garden to me on my recent visit to Pennsylvania.

So sitting in the St. Columba chapel before Timm's crypt last week was woven of many strands of history: my father and I in that space together over the years; attending Will's wedding to Sarah, and their history there and nearby; Beth and I making our wedding vows; Timm and I together at last. I think of that red sandstone boulder in the chapel's center as a heart - my father's, my own, the world's -- now also a resting place for one fragment of Timm's (for his heart is many places, with his dust, as his loves were scattered far too).

The stone chapel in the woods has too become a deep metaphor for me; each morning when I get up way before first light to read and write, I feel like I sit in such a chapel of the ages, deep in the forest, or on some great sea's shore, or in the deepest, wildest, most truthful region of my heart. Of my morning ocean devotions I wrote:

SALT CHAPEL

I am of the tribe of ocean-faring monks
who roam blue deserts in search
of You, writing Your blue wonders down.
Such psaltery is of gospel truths but
yet unknown, revealed wave by wave
from isle to isle in an underwater
majescule, anchored in God's darker
vaults. Some abbey fathers raised Your
walls by digging down through earth
to water; ours found singing halls
the other way around, reaching sacred
ground upon a dolphin's back and
then plunging down to basalt floors
a thousand chapel leagues or more.
The old ones disturbed there are first
and last in Your husbandry, ogres
and their gigantessas in consort
of stone truths only moons and
stars exult the full language of. That
ore is what we ferry here, copyists
of brine in brutal brogue, each
line crammed with the hieroglyphs and
griffin-curves which cram the bottom
of all seas, down there in the
greater half of my heart where the wild
ones roam, singing, we, too, are
children of God. Each voyage here is
a fat volume of water and its wonders,
on shores too far below.
Read on if you dare to lose your
land legs and dry soul. Come to
know what only water angels dare
to sing in that salt scriptorium
between the narwhal's ribs at
the bottom of what's below.

On the day Timm died I was down at Mom's with sister Molly, deep in the shock of massive grief, the day breezy and fair, the yellow blossoms of a tree across the street burning with almost obscene beauty in contrast to the freezing char the news had scored into our hearts. Almost numb -- after we all cried hard -- we sat there trying to recall just who had the heart murmur as a child, and guessed it was Timm. So his heart troubles may have been with him from the start.

Mom retrieved from a closet a box of Timm's relics -- she keeps one for each of us -- retrieving school pictures, report cards (average with the occasional rise and fall), other pictures, notes from his travels (sparse): iota of a son who had a motleyed childhood, who left home at 18 and moved ever westward.

In the box there was a school project, enclosed in a plastic report cover, titled "Legends of Old" which Timm created sometime in his middle- to- high-school years for a creative writing class. There are five verse Legends - stories of an old, lost race and a cover page which he illustrated.

Timm might have been in junior high when he wrote "Legends of Old..."

... Or he might have been in high school. This photo is prophetic, because it shows Timm readying to ship out on his first Teen Missions trip, to -- of course -- Alaska.

Interestingly, a note at the front to his teacher reads, "I would appreciate it if you ever read this to anyone, that you would not mention my name unless I ask you to." On the page following is another note:

To the reader:

In some of the poems in this booklet, I may sound like I am high or something of the sort, but I am not!

The Author

Is it insecurity which makes Timm cover over his tracks, not wanting to draw attention to his effort? His teacher gave him an A-plus and commented, "You have so much talent, Tim. I have considered it a pleasure to have had you in creative writing."

The first Legend is "The Distant Hills":

In the distant hills,
there are many tales,
About the past race,
who were their inhabitants.
Nobody knows where they came from,
and nobody knows where they went.
But some say they are still there
and play their games and tricks,
like of old.

There were elves and goblins,
witches and wizards,
fairies and pixies,
warlocks and giants,
and many more.
They grew and prospered
throughout their wide-
spread land.
They ruled this land with much
wisdom and justice.

Then one day, a stranger appeared,
and led them astray.
He sowed a seed of hate in
their hearts for each other,
and war broke out within
the land.
Many were killed before they
realized what this stranger
had done; but all too late.

Some say they are gone, and
some say they aren't;
But reports still occasionally
come in about the strange
happenings in
the distant hills.

It's obviously the poem of a junior writer -- Timm making his first attempts. I reads like late 19th century poetry, something by Browning or Tennyson. The sort of poetry which is conched in the colloquial folksoul, sounds which ehco readily in the ear and repeats on the tongue.

Timm's early fascination with "happenings in / the distant hills" must have been a constant in his imagination -- perhaps from very early in his youth -- because it shows up in this collection of poems from his middle- to high-school years and much later repeats, albeit in far more ripened form, in his Aire Borne writings of 2007, when he tried to make a complete prose cycle on a tale of a long-ago race of beings who lived in complete harmony. In the introduction to that Aire Borne cycle, he writes:

During this ancient time there was another race of humans that disappeared long before the Europeans began to explore the west, a race not of the land but of the air. They were referred to as the Aire Borne, neither men nor spirit but a hybrid, and they were the ones who had inhabited the far clouds that always punctuated the skies. While they were mortal their spiritual forefathers essence filled their beings stretching their days over hundreds of years.

* * *

Central to the early "Legends of Old" cycle is the notion of the stranger who appears in an idyllic, almost golden age to sow a fatal seed of discord. In his personal tale it's easy to see Timm in his teens looking back on his own childhood as basked in a similar, golden glow until events conspired to crack and spill him into a more perplexing, difficult age. Timm wrote about that stranger in his piece "The Sower and the Seed" in 2006:

I still remember the summer afternoon when I first met a Seed Sower. The title would make you think he would be an adult, wise in years instead of the fellow seven-year-old he was. In an upstairs room, with the merriment of a party going on downstairs the seed he cast on my child's heart found an immediate home.

At first a single shoot broke the surface of my heart, and over time the stalk of wheat began to reach for the sky.

Unfortunately, the stalk was not alone. As it grew other plants also began to sprout - weeds who's presence I had no idea about. At first I paid them no heed, accepting them as a part of life. Some of the weed bore beautiful flowers of red and blue, sweet to smell, belying their deadly nature. Eventually they were as big as I was, filling the shared soil with their roots, robbing me of the sustanence to grow and crowding the sun from my view.

***

I've been reading Spenser's "Faerie Queene" of late, an epic pastoral written at the beginning of the 17th century about a Golden Age of Olde which Spenser devoutly believed in, if only in his imagination, the cycle deriving much from tales and folklore he heard as a child in England. Spenser thought Queen Elizabeth was nearly divine, yet he did not think the golden age of folklore and childhood could be resurrected except in the literary poem sung in an archaic tongue:

Lo! I, the man whose Muse whylome did maske,
As time her taught, in lowly Shepards weeds,
Am now enforst, a farre unfitter taske,
For trumpets stern to change mine Oaten reeds,
And sign of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds;
Whose praises having slept in silence long,
Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds
To blazon broade amongst her learned throng:
Fierce warres and faithful loves shall moralize my song.

Maybe this is an archetypal sense deep in the ear of the heart of every poet and lover: a yearning for the womblike unity and peace of first days and first love.



The next poem in "Legends of Olde" is "Man Man Moon":

I went on a journey,
that led me far, far away.
I went on this journey, with
the mad man moon.

He took me by the hand
and, I thought I had wings
for my arms.
He floated off the ground, and
soared the skies.

He showed me places that even
the birds of
prey were oblivious
of.
He showed me castles in the clouds,
that were decked with gold.

We saw the lord of the skies, and
the queen of the clouds.

then we flew off again, to the
many battlefields in the skies,
where many battles are
still being fought.
Then with the wind at our
heels, we headed back towards
earth

and there he left me, and felw
off again
and to this day I still watch
the skies, hoping to catch
a glimpse of that mad man
moon.

How much of this is in Timm's late poem, "The Kingdom of the Sky" (March 2006)

... I dream of stretching my arms heavenward
And with a leap take way
Visiting the far off places I know only belongs to the winds
I'll bank around a billowing pillar and dive beneath it's feet
I'll slide across a narrow edge as I tumble thru a break

I'll follow the evening rays - I'll let them point the way
Across the majestic airy expanse of the kingdom in the sky.

Then there is Timm's westwarding spirit, at once moving across the continent as back in time and up into the heavens. Perhaps this is a genetic impulse, for all of us Cohea kids moved far west at one time (or wished to; Molly had just about loaded up her wagon to move to Wyoming when she met her future husband Jim and remained in Central Florida to raise her family). On our father's side, the Irish diaspora came to America in John O'Cobhthaigh's travel from Cork to Boston Harbors aboard the Sea Sprite in 1778; we lost our original name when he emerged that port, now with the Anglicized name of Cohea. From there it was a slow westward movement, through Springfields Massachusetts, Tenneseee and Illionois, our clan settling near Cedar Rapids but other branches of the family moving south and west to Arizona and California.

Of the Cohea clan there is a strong impulse to travel westward; it heaved in the hearts of all of us Cohea kids; the O'Cobhthaigh's felt it in Ireland, shipping west across the sea and then traveling across the American continent; the Irish O'Cobhthaighs have a fish-rider astride the family crest, perhaps coming to Ireland from Brittany in France, where there are Dauphin and Delphine clans, fish-riders too; the Celtic migration into Europe stems from the far-older Indo-European migrations, westward across Asia into Germany, up the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic to port in Spain.

The Cohea kids, like many in our clan, all had a hankering to go West. Timm, David, Will, Molly.

So that westward heave is quite ancient in our breast ... But I would hasten to add that it was not solely an O'Cobhthaigh response. On Friday my mother stopped by my job to drop off some history materials on both her paternal and maternal genealogies, the Wimberleys on her father's side (an English family of genrtry with roots back into the 15th century) and on her mother's side the Macks of Scots-Irish origin (sourcing, alternately, in the MacGregors, a cattle-rustlin' clan who lost their name in a border dispute - thus becoming the Macks, and also the Max of German-Jewish origin). Both the Macks and Wimberleys made it across to the United States in the early decades of the 18th century, so the American movement of our whole family is roughly contemporaneous, and the pulse of motion is westward and southern.

Such duplex motion sounds like back and down, a very archetypal movement. It's like Timm's idea of a distant land which is both up in the sky and in the mountains. His oldest visions were his also his latter ones; he dreamt of a childhood paradise he might live in again. In his late poem "Childhood Dreams" (April 2006) he writes,

... On summer nights when honeysuckle fills
The heavy night air
The moon sculpts her shapes on a
Transformed land
I still see myself laying in my
Childhood bed
Dreaming of this day and
Many others
And all I can wonder is
Was this what I envisioned?

I see that Mad Man Moon with its invitation to voyage back and down, far west and up into the sky kingdom which is also across the mountains, over the rainbow, deep in the sea, singing, as it always had for Timm, as it has for all of us Cohea kids, perhaps of the westwarding soul of the ancient Indo-European tribes whose blood still circuits our hearts, of a far-off shore where the heart can plant itself and begin at last. Timm surely heard its call, in his teens, when he wrote the third Legend of Old, "The Western Wind":

In the Southern end of the
Black mountains,
On only certain times of the
year, when the wind
from the West blows,
People say strange things
begin to happen.

They say that the ground
begins to sing, and the
air is alive with the sound
of music.
They say that the rocks walk
and the trees run.

But if you sit for a little
while, without being
seen, the mystery of it
all is solved.

Holes pop open from the ground,
and little people emerge
singing their songs of
old,

And men on winged horses
appear in the sky and
land nearby the
little people, with their many
instruments,
the trees fade away and elflike
creatures appear in their
place.

And the rocks straighten up, and
many dwarfs appear.
Then they all assemble in a little
clearing where the riders
play their instruments, and
the dwarfs, elves, and
little people sing and
dance.

After this, food is cooked, and
a feast beyond all means of
comprehension is held.
But when the sun begins to set,
and the shadows grow long
they all returned from where
they came from.

But when the wind blows from
the west they will all
be back,
To sing, and dance, once
more.

I always thought the direction of a wind - the West wind, say - blew in from that direction, but actually it's the reverse, and Timm's poem makes better sense the other way around: A Western wind blows one westward, like the exhalation an ancient, tribal, questing father, pointing us ever toward the setting sun over western hills. "They will all be back" is also better read in the reverse, as in "they will again be found" in the westward quest, when the mind and heart get back on that road and travel yet further, as Timm did over the years, Florida to Indiana to Colorodo to Wyoming to Oregon, there to westernmost shores, finding again a teeming life that had been lost. A grail quest whose most sacred vessel was Timm's own heart.

It was also an exceedingly difficult quest, perhaps only attainable in the imagination, during the writing, the creating. For Timm, the way was greatly obstructed; he would find glimmers and gleams of that grail of happiness along the way, in his music, his gorgeous photographs, in love's calyx and thorn. I believe he discovered that to fill that magic cup he had to pour his heart full out, give all his love away, for in so giving, one fullest receives.

The final poem in "Tales of Old" sounds a tragic note which proved so fateful in Timm's own story. Events conspired to end Timm's childhood as they do to cast all of us out that first Eden. And as for all of us, for Timm the way back was clouded, obscured in mist, deep in a trackless forest which no map can lead us through. For Timm, whether due to his nature or the nurture of his own history, the fate of his childhood proved the fate of his life, for the stranger who sowed the ill seed returned as the reaper who arrived in the placque which tore loose from his anterior descending artery on April 18, 2008, causing the massive heart attack he did not survive. The shadowy wrongs of Timm's past became the shadowy wrongs of his years, wrongs which he strove hard to recover from. He was greatly at war with himself at times, with selves which were at times so separate, conflicted. There is a reading for Timm's heart trouble and death which sees his conflicted emotions as the cause; yet, in the way of all hen-and-egg dichotomies, his conflicted emotions may have had their true root in the heart condition he was born with.

The last poem of "Legends of Old" is the saddest of the series. It is Timm the teen casting around Central Florida in the late 1970s, feeling deeply the loss of his childhood, of the family which had recently broken apart for good. He was also observant of a Florida quickly being subsumed by development, its lakes and fields morphing into faceless suburbs. In his ennui for lost childhood surely there was an ache for older times when the connection with nature was truer, more honest, most loving. There is the pessimism of a teen trying to make sense of a jangly discord in his heart, emotional and/or physical; at times he must have heard a judgment horn blowing - his Christianity surely handed him that end-time instrument, signaling an end to times past as well as his personal time in the future, which proved to be the night of April 18 this year.

THE GREAT BATTLE

In the gold rush times
of the Klondike,
There were many stories
about the people who
were once king.
They were known as the
Cintauns. ((prob. "Centaurs"))
They were half-man half-horse
and they were mean.
They ruled their land with
force and injustice.
They fought and killed without any mercy,
and took their land.
They took prisoners, and made
them slave away,
building huts and collecting
food.
But one day the scattered remnants
of the outskirts gathered
together and a great force
was created.
They convinced some far away
kingdom to join in
the battle against
Cintauns.
Then they all gathered and divided
up.
They surrounded the Cintauns and
fought.
The Cintauns didn't have a
chance and they were completely
wiped out.
they are all gone from the region
and probably will never return.

A final battle in a far-westernmost land, at the end of migrations, of seeking, of yearning; the end of one order, the slow beginning of the next. Timm is ambivalent in this poem -- these Cintauns or Centaurs are part of the mythic past, but they are difficult, dangerous, hybrid of human and animal nature - full of energies beyond the simple nutrients of embryonic childhood. He struggles to finish the tale, digging for plot devices which don't quite work back then. For history - and futurity - to redeem itself, another, final poem should have been written.

However, I like that "The Final Battle" ends "Legends of Old," because it leaves room for Timm to write that final poem with the rest of his life.

If the Cintauns - Centaurs, if they be half-man, half-animal - are part of the golden past, then their warlike, difficult nature must be reconciled. Centaurs were also mentors, teachers of the human race, albeit the knowledge they transmitted had something to do with our animal roots. In March 2006 Timm wrote the poem "The Wildness of My Soul," attempting to acccept that a deep animal is strong in him and cannot -- should not -- be exorcised, though surely that beast (his animal half) makes the way more perplex:

...His kind is not accepted in our tame and timid world.
He frightens us with his barbarism and reminds us we are weak.
He makes a scene with hardly a care for convention
He's incorrigable, he is me and that's why he was banished.

But I can't help feeling he is who I was created to be.
Only through accepting that will I then truly live.
Out of the center and not from the man I truly wish I were.

Perhaps the struggle between elements -- one spiritual, one earthly -- was like chambers of Timm's heart, too conflicted, at war within his own borders, to survive. Perhaps all that was imaginary and Timm died of very natural, if also very premature, causes.

"Legends of Old" does not resolve the conflict, nor does Timm's later writings (perhaps that's why he preferred music and photography, which could offer a purer witness to the balm of nature) though there is a strong glimmer of hope. In the last chapter (7) of the "Aire Borne" series on Timm's laptop, which he last visited on Jan. 7, 2007, the story of a love affair between a woman of the Aire Borne and a mortal man concludes with the pair escaping the judgement of her tribe (that she be tethered to a dragon and hauled off to a far-off lake where she would be deposited for all eternity) departing from the land of fable and dream to marry each other in the present.

Living and speaking and loving from the heart was the central metaphor for Timm's last years, paradoxical in that his history of the heart had been so conflicted, perfectly sensible as the only true grail of the soul questing for union with God and an other. This is the final poem from "Legends of Old" which Timm quested for and in large measure was able to write with the years he was allotted. Like the mortal hero who brought his faery love back from the otherworld, Timm, I believe, had begin to make the old story real in the present he was entering. He had forgiven in large measure the demons of his past and made deep amends for the wrongs he had done others as well as himself in the service of those demons (his own sins). He certainly had planted himself deeply in his church and AA and community service to the area. The boy of fable -- sometimes good, sometimes bad - was becoming a man. Then came his last, awful, fateful battle on this earth with his heart, and that was that, for this world at least.



I for one pray Timm is voyaging away on that fish-mount, that surf-saddle, free at last to be wholly himself, half-man, half-mythical wandering horse, into that next realm, singing in that fine baritone, those blue blue eyes in wonder of the blue blue heaven which presses down upon us every day with legends of old awaiting us on the most final of shores.

BOY ON A DOLPHIN

by David, 2006


He is forever young astride
that sleek so wild blue dolphin,
enwombed still in first bliss.

The flower tucked behind
his ear gardens a listening
which trumpets moonlight
back with wild bloom,
hurling such sweet
and wet perfume that
the sea itself swoons enrapt,
sending curve after curve
of undulant blue his way.

No wonder he appeared
on so many ancient coins,
poster boy of fortune's pluck,
the gilded lucre by which
old men get maids to fuck,
a way to duck death's
swash by minting back
the eyes with youth.

Always a sea and shore
between his romp;
boy and fish merge
in the marge of tidal
marches which
pulse a God's blue
augments as they crash
and ebb the heart.

Always a fish-tail for
ship's rudder, a song
for wet travail, a course
both known and
abyssal toward ends
both gold and bone.

And though the visage
of this tale is young
-- both boy and fish
careen in puppy glee --
it masks a far far
older man's dark face,
that brooder of the
first horrific sea,
bull-ravager of Europa,
the wolfish sharps and flats of
Apollo's golden lyre
keyed from Hypoborean
depths.

That old man is
Uranos, cleft of his
manhood, dreaming
Aphrodite from the
froth of that wound:

He's the ghost of the
singer Arion, doomed to sing
to a court of whale-
and ship-ribs
two hundred leagues
below the wake he
was ditched by pirates in,
singing of rescue
to dry shores by the
dolphin not found
outside of songs:

He is Poseidon
inside his stallion
hooves which you
hear bestride the waves'
stampede to shore, a
thunder which grows
loud the more both sea
and land agree to share the
augments of a strand's
so liquid rocky roar.

Behind or under that
puerile sweet of song's first
crash and plunge
wakes first man of the sea,
a giant walking just beneath
the boy we care to see.
The boy astride the dolphin
crests so much that's far
under me, ruddering his
courses in this hand which
writes his emblem down.