Sitting with Timm in the chapel

The St. Columba Chapel, photographed by Timm in April 2007 when he was here for Dad's 80th birthday. His crypt is in the floor on the far side of the stone in the center. I wrote this poem sitting on the bench under the window in the center.

Well here I am bro, sitting next to your
crypt in the Columcille chapel,
writing this letter to you in the
one-way Ouija of this comp book,
this pen no planchette of blue depths
though I’ve learned to sail it fleetingly,
singing like water’s own anchorite
from its blank prow. Today it’s calm
and only slightly cool in here, the
green stain-glass-windows turning
the bright light of day into smooth
sea-glass, an aquamarine calm
which is serene, almost merry,
after the churlish clouds which
yesterday dumped rain all day
over the land -- three inches, which
the Pocono Record said today
is a record.

A torrent of tears for you, I’d say,
gouted from God’s all-seeing eyes.
Breezes in the trees outside, washing
like a surf against the hallows of this
stone room, an outside angelic
whisper of lauds which surely
is to my hearing as my voice is to you,
particled under that dull sand-
colored slab. Of course I know
I’m talking to your dirt, the nth
part of you that didn’t burn away
in the undertaker’s pyre, cinders
of bone and tooth, perhaps a flake
of that myocardial-infarcted heart
which could not be donated,
having rendered itself useless
in the lists of anyone’s life,
dispatching your spirit at last
back up to the bosoms of God
at 1:50 a.m. April 18 2008. But
greater remains of you are here
more than anywhere else that
I might sit close to on this earth
so I’ll take that for the presence
which makes me cry so hard for.

Timm, Timm, your name I rake
through those ashes, holding on
to all that can’t remain ever in
this life -- your smile, your love
of beauty, that acreage of wounds
which you turned into a garden
overspilling with blooms when
you forgave history’s sins. Your
blue blue blue blue eyes.

The sky today looks down your
way, merry and bright and clear
as the day you skedaddled away
from home on that broom,
forever two years old, cupidon
forever on the fish I too ride.
The sky today is as blue
as the Saturday in Salem
the weekend before you died,
captured for the immensity
on your camera as you
took those pictures in the park
of children playing and parents
smiling and dogs frolicking, free.
The ocean’s sort of blue in deep
water where there’s only depth
and height, mirroring the soul’s
infinity -- a womb you’re free to
ride in now on that broom.

I’m having a good visit here with Dad,
talking about so much as we usually
do -- politics and Being, stonework
and the dance, the beauty of the
land at this cusp of the year,
his latest will and his archives which
I’ve promised to tend, my writings,
you. Today he was off-balance though,
stiff and shaky on his feet, worried
about the ministrokes which have
toddered him several times so close
to your vault in this old, cool, stone-
ringed room. Next time I’m here
he may be there, commingled with your
remains, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
father and lastborn rounded back
into each other. Will it be strange
to sing to both him and you,
my Ouija bifurcated, voice in parallax
with your separate and somewhat
antipathetic shades, in my mind’s
common loam? What of his archives
massed upon yours? Will the massive
father’s monoliths crush the fleeing
son’s bouquet?

Who knows. That’s not my task today.
We’re alone in here, right? Me and you,
I and Thou separated by that heavy
stone at my feet. But other presences
do attend -- the ashes of another buried
in a nearby crypt -- Albertine’s, dead
in her late 80s -- mutter almost silently
though a note of her lonely bored
and angry spirit resounds. The Guardians
my father invited from Iona look
over my shoulder; when I speak in here
the lower tones of my voice are theirs,
the bass part of the sea. The world’s
close by outside; a car rallies up Fox
Gap Road, a shotgun nails an imagined
intruder or terrorist or terrified deer
in the distance; someone's hammering
a board. Dad is wobbling up in the house,
Fred palsying his lunch, there’s a big
vote in the House today on
that 700 hundred billion dollar
Wall Street bailout today, my wife
is alone in my house in Florida
with all of our cats sewing perfect
embroideries that can’t sell enough:

All that presses close, like my bowels
which have been so slow to move
on this trip, like the migraine I woke
up with at 2:15 a.m. and still
thuds sickly in my skull despite
a Maxalt and a Frova --: presences
which press in from the distance
while your absence lingers front
and center before the huge
sandstone turtle of a boulder
which centers this chapel.

Light flickers on a spot of the floor,
the trees are whispering Hey bro,
and you? You’re exactly here in this
chapel-sized hole in my heart
where we worship and sing together
about the cold sea’s terrible beauty
which crashes forever on this shore
where I will never find you
though we still manage to linger
together on the other sides of that stone
engraven with the fish-rider,
the dolmen Thor’s Gate and a
celtic cross. They’re myths of us
which there is still time to name
and propound together,
me with my sad ear cocked to your shade
and your voice whispering from
down there and in the trees
breezing overhead and in the
waters just offshore
this damaged singing art of a heart
we continue to walk on through,
like a wind, while God’s sky
today is the serenest sheer blue
no matter what waits for us
outside that chapel door.

The stone which covers Timm's crypt. Half of Dad's ashes will ultimately join Timm under this stone. (The other half of Dad's ashes are to be buried at Iona.)

The St. Columba chapel, Sept. 30, 2008.