Remembering Timm O'Cobhthaigh: Yes

Silver Falls Snow Day, Jan. 31, 2008.

Well bro, here we are,
Thanksgiving Day at
this memorial
going on eight months
after your death,
me in this chair as usual
writing another verse letter
to that embering presence
which was once your life
now scattered on shores
you walk beyond,
far, far away
from we who still
need to remember you.

I have tried to
let you go in fullness,
remembering as
best I can your life,
accounting in
this verse miniscule
all your large hurts
and loves and gifts
to the world
which you poured
out in word and image
and sound - traces
and fragments which
can never bring you back
yet ring of you,
like tiny bells, with
soundings of your name ...

... Timm ...

I have come across
so many treasures in the
shore-wrack of your earnest life
and tried to share them
as best as I can here
torrid seascapes and
mountain spreads,
silvery falls of wonder,
all those flowers whose
gossamer mouths
chorale what is too great,
too pure, too simple
for a mortal heart to sustain.

Those images I refrain
to this world's fast-passing glance
because I too believe they heal
our gaze of broken views,
making the eye a lover
once again, a fabulist,
the ecstatic anchorite
of the moment,
faith renewed and vital,
a Yes for failing ways.

Your springtime ended
early-April 18 of this year-
allotting, as I heard from
your friends in Oregon,
just one spell
of fine fair clear weather
on your final weekend.

You were busy, taking
advantage of that
perfect light (how many
images you never took,
I wonder, for all the
cloudiness of the region),
photographing kids at play
and dogs in the park,
taking many frames of the
state capitol with all
those cherry trees in bloom,
pink flames in routing
heart-blue skies, welcoming
you to a homeward row

which caught you unawares
a few days later, after a run -
that sudden rupture of the chest,
those hours of hard farewell
alone in the emergency room
at Salem Hospital
until you relaxed and
disappeared into the night.

All clouded over
the next day and
winter came back with
a vengeance, cold and
sleeting when I stepped
off the plane in Portland
that night, icy and miserable
as I drove my rented car
to Salem, as if to
wind a dark sheet around
your absented life
and bid us mourn
the presence you can't be,
the vacancies you are.

Who knew the sort of
year which would follow,
your death tolling a bell
which would ring
heavier as the year
progressed, grieving
and hollow in the personal
world with so many other
losses creeping in -
friends my age with
cancers, Zooey our
old calilco dying last
summer (we put her down,
old fighter, when
her will to hang on
let go at last), our
finances getting
more and more difficult,
career more tenuous,
the pluck to make
a big new inroad
fading into the
weary suck
of pessimism --

And all that merely foreground
to what went so wrong in
the big world, Tim Russert
dying of the same heart
attack that killed you,
the meltdown in the world
economy at its flashpoint
on our September 15,
your candidate winning
the election though I fear
he's lost the war already
with so much in
burning shambles.

We don't know what's to
come but like an accident
in slow-motion we watch
it come into focus on
the next day's bad news-
foreclosures, bailouts,
unemployment rate
climbing high and higher
and retailers hoping for
the best and planning
to close up shop after Christmas.

The mood is chilly and dark,
like those days after your death
when the world's bulb
seemed vanquished, little
more to say, less to do,
wrapping its broken wings
around what's left
and commencing that
hard fall which follows
you into the dark tide
which endlessly
whips far-northern shores.

The ways of nature
dwindle that way too,
each day another grain
drained down the glass,
each dawn late and later
and each dusk leeching
the afternoon's wan light
into its crepuscular domain
too soon and even sooner
til there seems little
left of light, a flicker
of a solstice candle
on the greatest night
of all, the one none
may quite survive ...

And yet we learn from
the world you saw
that where the light is least
there is also hope, also
what is worth loving most.
I saw found an email
from you where you
told a friend that perhaps
you'd make it home this
year, "endure" a family
Christmas for once.

Of that holiday you'd apparently
had enough lonely ones,
nurture of nature
spent in solitude gone
as far as it could. You
were also tired of rainy
Oregon, and thought to
move somewhere closer
to the East coast where
we live, your family,
your difficult arrears
with the life you were dealt.

In the year of your
final homecoming
you were planning to
come home, closer at least.
Now in death you
are far closer and
farthest away,
your dust poured
in the floor of Dad's
chapel, your portfolio
lining the walls of
the cyber memorial
I tend for you
and fronting greeting
cards Mom sends
out to the world.

Hard cycle these
coming holidays, as
they always are in grief:
How do we give thanks
for a falling world
so empty now of you?

Today is Thanksgiving.
Mom, who flew up
to Pennsylvania
yesterday to be with
our dad and brother,
will see your crypt
for the first time,
walking the far-colder
grounds of Columcille;

perhaps there will be
closure in that harrow,
a measure of farewell
she hasn't found in
the incessant round
of days living beyond
your death.

It may be healing for
her to greive
with Dad and Will,
the living coming
together to remember
the dead and love
on with we who remain.

We who remain: that
has an odd sound on
the tongue, an iron sort
of tenor which is heavy-
hearted and dull,
with so much to miss
about you, with so
much to get done
when the time
constricts and drains
and ages us so.

It's odd then that
what is most comforting
to me this cold dark
morning of Thanksgiving
(my wife stirring upstairs,
so much cleaning
and cooking yet to
do before her parents
and sister's kin come
over for the meal,
Belle in my lap as
I try to write)
that the pure longing
of your heart remains
and comforts me today;

that each astonishingly
beautiful image that you
captured with your lens
encourages me to believe
there's more, plenty left
for what remains of a life,
right here, right now,
inside my wife's yawns
upstairs, blent with
Belle's near-silent breaths;

Sounds of the living
pressing back against
your darkened shore.
There is a refrain
I believe our God
loves to hear most
from us: Yes, Yes,
Yes, we sigh and sing,
praising the beauties
and amazements of
the living world.

Praising the moment.
Believing your life
mattered. Giving
back the whole
darn thing in
love and wonder
like a bouquet
back to God.
Happy Thanksgiving,
brother, thanks
for filling the
cornocopiea with
wonders and joys
and beauties
which all cry Yes.