He means well and offers connection
when he remarks how the children have grown,
that it won’t be too long before they aren’t around.
My daughter blinks her eyes
while my son mouths to me that
it isn’t true.
My own sense of the truth of his words
doesn’t make them welcome in the moment
of which they are now an indelible part.
I was never more proud of my son than I was that day, just a few weeks ago. Thank goodness that has worn away, so I can keep loving him for who he is.
My wife and I have been working on a landscaping project at the house, converting a thousand-square foot area from grass to perennials and herbs. Grass never grew well in this south-facing area, and I am excited about having even more fresh flowers to cut in future years. As a part of the project, I decided to replace a section of fence with a dry stone wall and to install a border of paving stones between the driveway and this new garden.
A couple of weeks back, the day’s work involved digging a trench for the pavers, sixty feet long and about a foot wide. Being next to an old asphalt driveway laid on top of New England clay soil, there wasn’t much easy digging. As I went, I worked to save the small rocks that came out of the ground, since they would make good fill around the base of the stone wall. This meant sifting out the dirt and sorting the stones into different piles. One foot at a time, on a very warm August Saturday.
My son shuffled towards me relatively early in the day. Can I help, Dad?
I thought for a second about what he might be able to do. My initial reaction was that he wouldn’t be able to help. The pick axe is too heavy for him, I thought. The weight of stones themselves, while small, would add up quickly, and they needed to be piled a good fifty feet from where I was working. The wheelbarrow is too big for him to manage.
Sure, I said, still thinking. Go get a bucket, one of the big ones. And put some good shoes on.
daylight’s heat wanes —
withering in the arms
of dusk sounds
This morning,
our children surrounding you
as closely as the faded sheets,
you were not mine alone
to whisper,
to touch —
the years intervening
since that day
when the air was thicker, closer,
and I climbed down the rocks
near your parents’ house
to swim through the fog in the ocean,
a ritual cleansing of my own choosing.
Each breath of that morning
had been simple,
even anticipation ceasing —
perhaps succumbing
to its own inability
to describe any truth
but an assurance of
love,
holding us both
in unborn arms,
vast oceans,
and summer rainstorms.
Company is coming,
so I wander from room to room
putting things in proper places.
The night air is finally cool
as it drifts through the children’s windows —
I find reasons
to return magazines,
makeshift duct-tape wallets;
to drop off bracelets,
baby food jars filled with water and glitter.
I linger in each room,
the dim and waning light
shadowing small bodies as they sleep,
then turn toward the hallway
and the softness of an old
incandescent bulb
we can’t let go of
shining on the maple floor.
She’s rearranged her room
and proudly invites her father
to admire the work.
It makes up most of her world
on this summer afternoon —
careful placement of
well-worn friends,
books for reading
in the pillowed corner,
a place she has reserved for
hide-and-seek
just behind the bed.
If you lie right there
you can reach the fan, she tells him.
Turn it on, she says —
it smells just like the outside.
Her father looks out the window
as he turns the switch,
the ancient glass curving the view
across the lawn.
It really does, he replies,
tasting in that breath,
just for a moment at
the back of his throat,
the back of his memory,
his own childhood
rearranged room,
just-so and steady.
yellow moon rises
through thickness of air
ambition withers
fading
somewhere past paper thin
wisps of mourning
unreclaimed images
—
Many of my poems recently have been starting our long; I let them sit and then find myself stripping away words and lines that seem to clutter the feelings that first prompted me to write. Some moments I think I could write more without disturbing the essence if I were a better poet. Other moments, it seems just right.
It has been twenty of your birthdays
since I first saw you walking
in the afternoon light;
you slipped away for a time,
but later
we floated in the
midnight darkness of the lake,
timidly watched the sunrise
from granite steps.
This day bears little resemblance
outside the presence of you and I
and want of a breeze;
others in between are half-forgotten,
depending on photos in an album
to remind us —
yet still I see you walking
and wish you might come
to sit down beside me.
A co-worker and I stood in the office kitchen this morning as she searched for a spoon. We joked about how she might eat her cereal with a fork, how it might be easier if it were cereal and yogurt. My voice was clear and my laughter sounded easy. But my heart was somewhere else.
What is the toll, I wonder, from laughing, from pretending and projecting that all is well, when the reality is something different?
My wife and kids have been away for a few days, visiting family now that the school year has ended. I stayed home, with a few meetings this week that I could not miss. Last night I returned home close to midnight after one of those meetings and went out to close up the barn. Five of our six chickens were perched up on their roosts, with the sixth lying very still and awkwardly on the floor. I propped her up on some fresh hay for the night, but this morning she was less responsive and clearly dying. By now, she’s certainly passed.
My son was devestated this past fall when we lost our cat, a dear member of the family who the kids had grown up with. I was so deeply moved by his reaction as we buried her that a story poured out of me that night; that story became the inspiration for this blog.
The chickens were a present for him for his eighth birthday in April. He said it was the best birthday present ever.
I grew up raising chickens, along with sheep and rabbits. I remember the first spring flock that I was responsible for, and my dismay when we lost most of them to an intruder in the coop, likely a fox. I like to tell people that growing up around animals was a good experience, that I learned at an early age about caring for others, about life and death. My original Tibetan Buddhist practice, too, spoke of the value of coming to understand death as a part of our lives.
I’m not so sure this morning about either of those stories.
My son will come home today and learn about this new death. I’ll want to make everything all right for him, knowing at the same time that is not possible. I could look at this experience as a gift. But it’s hard. And what will I do when the death in our lives is closer?
I can’t share any of this with the people around me. I move around the office pretending that this is just another day. I pass by co-workers and talk jovially about this and that.
A little while ago I closed the office door to call my wife and let her know about the chicken, what is awaiting her at home. In the course of that conversation, I learned that the emails I have been sending to her over the last few days, reaching out to make a connection, have gone to an account she can’t access away from home. I hung up the phone feeling more isolated, then went to sit in a meeting and discuss the ramifications of the end of the fiscal year.
I didn’t realize it when I began, but my spiritual practice has taken shape as an effort to drop pretense, to live my life as it presents itself. In some respects, I have begun to realize this through Zen. At the Temple I can sit wth the complexity of fatherhood, marriage, love, joy and sadness, or share with a friend in the sangha after the evening practice has ended. I’ve been striving to do this at home too, with my wife and children, and it has allowed me to experience both joy and sadness more fully, more intimately.
At the same time, I am more accutely aware now of the places and times that I cannot. I worry about the cost.
When I get home this afternoon, I’ll hold my son and tell him it is okay to wonder why this has happened again to an animal he loved. I will tell him it is all right to be sad, to cry, to deeply feel whatever arises. I’ll tell him there’s no need to pretend.
bussokuseki 