Mortality (phts)

Beauty is a Truth
and has always been,
like Nature, a Thing Revealed.
Cartographers, you know, do not create
rivers, forests, clear mountain passes;
so, too, is the poet: a student, a passerby.
And, of course, what's now revealed
will be someday long lost:
the hidden treasure
(now gilded with a gift shop)
will lose itself once more for our dirt-
caked adventuring descendants to find.
I'd have it no other way!
What's the merit otherwise? Why else
do humans pursue Physics or Medicine?
Unless these endeavors briefly hoist back
the massive curtain hiding Truths
we young brief beings want to know, however
short it may be we live to see
these Truth-exposed times.
Poetry is only mortal! Thank God!
And yet somehow sometimes
she still reveals That Which Is--
somehow sometimes she is a puncture
in the fabric of Unknowing.




October 2016

Sandcastles

__________

Last night we couldn't find Jimmy and it turned out he was sleeping on the front porch, curled in a fetal position with his Nat Shermans sitting there, like someone dropped off a body at the hospital.  He was fine--just drunk--and Rob leaned over Jimmy and told him to get up in his Fireman Voice, asked what he was doing.  "Sleeping," Jimmy said.  "Come on," said Rob, this isn't your bed."  "Not my bed?! What do you mean, it's not my bed?!" shrieked Jimmy.  Not really debating the bed-ness of the concrete pad, I think.  It seemed Drunk Jimmy was mostly just astonished by Rob's Fireman Voice, which admittedly was jarring between friends.  The whole time, I just stood there watching stupidly.

Last week, Rob's best friend's dad died snorkeling in the Caribbean.  Also last week, a former student of Jimmy's hanged himself in the woods behind the house.  I guess a girl had broken up with the student.  They don't know what killed Rob's friend's dad.

Today Kevin and I built a sandcastle while the Toddler and Jimmy's son, who is six, helped here and there and destroyed it here and there.  We spent about twenty minutes on the castle and its town, and an hour and a half on the moats and sea walls in front.  The tide was coming in.  A wave hit our series of moats and exploded into a splash higher than anything we'd built, but it didn't take down the castle.  That was hours ago now.  High tide has come since then and the castle and its moats are gone forever.

Last night after we found Jimmy he went up to the roof with Kevin to smoke and cry.  I had to put the Toddler to bed.  When I was done, I went through the kitchen to follow Jimmy upstairs.  "Kevin waved Rob and Larry off," Crystal told me.  "He's... You may not want to..."  "I'm not scared," I said.

Kevin was in a chair and Jimmy was crumpled in a sitting heap on the roof deck.  I crumpled up next to Jimmy and lit a cigarette and didn't do a thing, but my shoulder pushed up on his and my knee pressed against his and I didn't shrink from him.

After he eventually stopped crying he started asking why Death always wins.  "He always wins," he said.  "I'm tired of staring him in the face.  I'm tired of his stench," rolling out the S in stench and ending with a sonic punch, like his larynx reached out and slapped the air.  "I'm tired of his fucking face."  Silence.  Continuing, in a mournful tone, "That's why I drink, that's why I smoke," and then, "Why?!  Why does he always, always, always win?" --which ended in a shout.  "Because we're mortal," I wanted to say, and, "Death has been defeated," but I didn't say anything at all.  Jimmy went downstairs eventually, and he was going to set up a game or a movie, but he and Crystal just went to bed in the end instead.  Everybody else went down to see the night beach except me and Kevin, and we talked about work for a while in that bland way people have who care, but don't have anything to say.

Jimmy worries that our fledgling church will die.  I do not honestly care.  I worry about Jimmy.  And Rob.  And Kevin.  And Crystal.  And I set up moat after moat, digging, putting my back into it, silently carrying on in my stupid way, crumpling up next to people and lighting cigarettes.

Because I know the tide will come.

But I still build sandcastles.  And moats to help them live past one more wave.

______

A Necessary Coda:

Later Jimmy told me I'd said something at dinner that night, which reminded him of terrors from his childhood.  Neither of us could remember what.  He'd gone outside to pray; he'd fallen asleep; that's how we'd found him.

So it was me, perhaps, that first sent him out to that concrete fetal nap.  Well, I meant no harm, useless as that is.  Two days later we spent the day on the beach and he sat behind us the entire day well into his cups.  We picked everything up in the afternoon to take it back to the house, and afterward I went back for Jimmy.  He was still sitting there, in the same exact position he'd occupied the whole day that'd just slipped past, but in our absence he was sobbing behind his dark sunglasses, his back heaving.

There weren't words to say and I didn't touch him or announce myself.  I fed a cheese curl to a seagull and built a tiny wall of reeds plugged into the sand.  I stared out at the ocean and wondered if I could do anything at all to help; the sea taught me to wait.

In the end, walking slowly back to the house holding his folded chair, I told him I didn't have any words, I told him that kid had made his own mistake.  "But he was a good kid, Peter," Jimmy said.  "He was a good kid."  I said some other useless things, and I asked him to drink less tomorrow, which he did.  In the real end, I mean the really real one, I guess I know my moats won't matter.  For all I try, my efforts only seem to destroy here and there so much as they help here and there, like the Toddler and Jimmy's six-year-old.  It takes the calming of the tides to mend some wounds.

Still, it's what I have, and in my stupid way, it's what makes most sense to me.  Sometimes I think the only human things worth doing are the ones that wash away.





October 2016