Songlines and Blue Skies

Hey bro,

Greetings from high summer

on this 38th-month anniversary

of your passing from this world.

How is it that so many months

have flown, their wings grown fleet

and faster as sand from that beach

we once walked together on

grinds down the mortal glass? 

Of course, of course -- grief's anchor

slowly and inexorably pulls loose from

that day you died in Salem,

allowing the living boat to go more

freely on the current, leaving that shore

where you were last seen running

on a fine spring day on to fade

behind us, even in memory, become

a living wound one lives with like

a bad back or a gimp knee, a hurt

among so many others in the days

that are allotted our mortal coil.

No news in this, simply an observation

that will always sound a sad note

in the choir of bells that toll our lives.

The heart heals so strangely though,

its wounds bleeding on beyond all physic,

bleeding until it decides the bleeding's done,

and then forming not scars but songs,

the music  of what we find inside

only when we lose something

that we came to find so dear

in passing from this world.

Australian aborigines have

hundreds of songlines in their

repertoire, each a path through

the pathless wilderness,

the melody and notes and

words pointing out this dead tree

and that gulley as avenue,

the ley to water or food

or a burial gound

laid out inside a song.

No writing, no maps, just

the song of going there

which by singing twice

gets you back.

That's what the heart does

I think, working through

its wounds: it finds a

songline to narrate the

way through grief. It was

loud and broken

on the day you died;

wild with strangeness

in the weeks to come,

picking out specific

points in the psychic

geography to keep

your memory in heart

even as the pain of

losing you changed

in tenor and pitch.

The song included

you on your red

saucer riding down

the sled-hill in Evanston

and grinning gap-toothed

from a brilliant pool in Florida,

playing barefoot in the black dirt

of Chicago and tracking all

those Western woods you

traveled on bike and hike

with camera firmly in one hand

and love more loosely

and uncertainly in the other.

The song also weaves

into the path the strange

way that all those memories

of our actual life together

merged with my recreation

of it,  how you came to live

in the work of naming your life

when not doing so would

have meant abandoning

you in the old bad way.

Three years now of tending

your memorial, sifting through

what you left behind with

a poet's weird forensic eye

- never scientific enough

in its rigor though sharper

for the inside detail, devoted

not so much to knowledge

of you - that's lost - as

to the task of keeping your aura

fresh,. What's woven is

the life that was your own

and this creation of the life

you didn't live to tell

with all the inaccuracies

and misdirection intact,

blurring the most painful details

so  remembering could

be spared brutallest blades

--more wounding is

not the point, what with

grief and guilt accomplishing

more than their share

of fresh blooding.

So there's two stanzas

of the song, your life

and this work of trying

to remember it: but there

is yet a third stanza to sing,

composed in a different key,

a strange dialect-older

or newer than the one

I grew up with, I'm not sure.

It describes the way

that memorial both

fathers and sons and

mothers and daughters

the brothering of hearts,

the yarn of kin

become the earning of it

in the yearn and burn

of its receipt delved

from the haunting of

the lived life and

the hallows of its memory.

Out of life; grief; out

of grief, some greater life,

more real and mysterious

at once, ghostly I guess

though the phrase is

way too two-dimensional

for the presence of you

which haunts--no, abides--

your absence.

I didn't know we were

twins separated by eight

years and a continent

until the pure connection

came again and again

as I read your writing on

this laptop and poured

through the greater

tonnage of your images.

From the tens of thousands

of those dots I found the

lucence of stars; from those

formed the constellations

of your tale which matched my own,

your Castor blent

with my Pollux, a bonding

not of vision but in what

we both came to see,

of  ways if not fates.

Maybe that's just a starry

fraud - the product of bonding

to the work too much,

as if I were any authority

on your life. (Now that's a hoot.)

The ones you truly shared

your last years with

know far more than I can ever

sift and find and divine;

they had years of days with you

while we on this side

of the continent -- your family-

had scant days over too many years.

But your distant friends

are silent - all of them -

either gone on or keeping,

for reasons I can only guess,

that horde of you to themselves.

I do not doubt they grieve,

I do not doubt they feel

they must protect your

memory from this light

an estranged brother

shines from far far away,

poking into what seems

like the dark but is

far more intimate to

them, like sleep, or dreams.

They are farther from us

today than you are,

figments of the greater

part of your lost life.

The only difference

is that one day perhaps

I'll hear from one

and get some new detail

to add here about you;

there's always hope.

So this memorial at

best captures only a tangent

of your life, collated from

years of shared childhood

that had so much bad

amid the good I've come

to see as just as bountiful,

the undersides of pain

pulsed by the heart's green

physic, growing new shoots

exactly where a scythe has mown.

A partial record of a distant

life that we hold on to because

it's all we have left. Thus

the third stanza is sung in this

bittersweetest  yet most

durable key, one that

time and its acid washes

somehow cannot burn clean.

I read the obits in the online

version of our local paper every

day-searching, I guess, for

news of your sort, to see who

I've survived. (I'm getting to

that age.)  Often I come

across a memorial, that

date the anniversary of

a death of maybe a year

past, or five or ten years gone.

Once I saw a memorial

for a daughter who died

in a DUI crash in '81--the

same year you almost died

and in some ways did

and others found a way

to outlive your eventual death,

writing the experience down

and living on with a somewhat

skewed view of living

having glimpsed the beyond

for a few moments on that

ER table.

You survived that crash

for 27 more years,

picking up 16 AA blue

chips for successive years

sober, the dangerous

running man no more.

Now we're picking up

the chips, surviving now

three years past your death.

Will one of us be still at this

work, posting memorials

27 years after you're gone?

Now that's a songline; what

a road! It's possible; I've

seen the obits.

But I speculate; we are not

allowed to see  that far ahead.

The work obviously

will change as others of

us die; perhaps a next songline

will come to us then, the

road forking this way then that

with each new loss, coming

to an abrupt end in one silenced

mouth, picked up perhaps in

a wholly different way (in

pictures, say, not poems,

in visits to gravesites on

actual ground rather than this

online tomb, listening for a father

on the wind, a mother

in the sound of the surf,

a brother in panoramic scenes

or a sister in the smiles of her kids.

Who knows? The songs are written

by the heart's accord, its

winding through its wounds.

It's hot as heck there days here,

the rainy season late to come,

everything wilted bad and

burning. Times are tougher now

than ever, it seems, our

security ever frailer

with bad news going worse

from every corner of the

world. Seems so to me today

but it probably looked

the same way to you back when,

the record of warp and woe

always running past the brim

of what we think we can handle,

what we pray to our God for

strength and clarity and passion.

Yeah, it's hot and how

and so bad there's no

way to know whether we'll

make it to where we hoped

to go; but then you didn't

make it either, or were

re-directed in mid-course

and that was that.

That was that, and

this is this, and both

are in the melody

this 38th-month

anniversary. Tomorrow

iss Father's Day

and that dopplers

into this poem's

wobbly weave,

Dad at 84 still

keepin' on keepin'

on, his ticker

beating strong

forty years after

his  first heart attack

though with all

the arrears such

physical and emotive

plumbing gets

pumping blood

through a life's

arteries;

Next month he gets

the carotids checked again-

they're packed almost

full of plaque-the

procedure to clear 'em

more dangerous

than leaving them be

though he's within

a percentage point

or two of blockage

to where he'll have

to go under the knife

and get those badboys

scraped clean.

He says he often walks the

grounds of Columcille

feeling your spirit near,

your ashes in the chapel

and in the Cnoc Cobhain

dolmen dirt raising

up the image of the

two of you walking together

as you learned to in

your latter years,

as much man to man

as father to son, the

way all men become

when both grow up.

He and I walk that way too,

much older now, our

years of talking and smoking

and drinking Scotch reduced

to talking on the telephone

though still pacing the

same ground together,

a place patched together

from history and mystery,

a dream our blood knows

irrelevant of  time or space.

You knew it too though

you preferred your own

way of saying it - of course -

writing about a tribe called

the Aire  Born who inhabited

the skies of this country

before the first Europeans

arrived-bits of Native

American myth woven

into Celtic lore, so that

a man from Up There

longed for a woman

Down Here & their

romance pure Arthurian,

Gawain come to the

Green Knight's castle,

wooed by his wife

the Maiden of the Wood,

spirit and soul meeting

on a common ground

you tried to found

in the last years

you were bound to this life.

Then your heart attack

and you were free

to return back to that

airy citadel from whence

dreams and God and

love live on in gauzy

Permanence, where the

entanglement of heart and

art knows no decay, the

image always sharp

and dead-on, and love

is the simplest thing to

pour, like the purest

water of blue song.

That's what I come

to sing today, deep

inside the third cup

of the life you poured out:

how blue the skies

are this day; and even

though it's devilishly hot

the hue is a pure as

your blue eyes

which looked with such

astonishment at the

wonder of the world,

even though it wounded you

and killed you at last.

Nothing but blue skies:

that's heaven, or the

way the singer put it

in the depth of the

Depression, a songline

for getting on by

working through

the awfulness of blues

to the awe of wonder's blue.

Happy anniversary, bro.