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Coming today to the garden
I am seeing change in motion
the seeming solidity
of massed trees and leaves
becomes translucent, now veil upon veil
of golden and green.
My gaze slips through
to the steep hill banks
on the hillside, still
massed and brilliant.
Gold flecks fall and fall
leisurely, separately,
tens at a time
to patter down through
pellucid air -
like manna, like divine
energy
coming into matter.
And here, farther in,
more trees bared
reveal the ordinary
earth and oncoming winter.
Yesterday's bold and brilliant blue
is softened by skeins of cloud.
Change in motion -
beyond our grasp.
Two days ago,
down the brilliant color
of the river valley
the family came canoeing
just when I was here -
snapping pictures of beauty -
their lives were overturned
bythe freak canoe accident
pinning little Rosa in the water.
That evening, as their inconsolable
grief took hold, unknown
yet to us,
in the darkened Quaker meetinghouse
our atheist, god-seeking poet
read out his poem
about children on the water -
like leaves -
"They could be yours."
What he meant to say,
is hearts are breaking
everywhere,
hearts embracing
intolerable pain
of each other.
Soon, the golden mass before me
will be empty,
the veils of beauty on beauty
that lifted me
from sorrow, that seemed to
know it,
and answer with steadfastness,
soon will be no more
than a memory
a handful of photos, flattened
and falsely still.
(Squirrel comes gazing and
gazing at me;
fly lights
upon the page.)
I came to interrogate the garden -
the presumed power of order
and renewal behind it -
and my own unvoiced question:
How do I live?
Stripped to its bark
and bare earth
(as I know it will be)
how can I endure my life?
Today, I said I would come here
to open myself to whatever
might be softly spoken
in the wind.
And now, in this hollow tucked away
at the back of the garden,
I sit - the light can fill it
now most of the leaves are gone.
In front of me a gold-green maple
still holds its leaves -
soon, they'll all drop down
a ball dress shrugged off
at the weary end
of the festival.
Squirrels rustle around me -
unalarmed by my stillness.
A chant comes to mind
(perhaps willed for comfort
perhaps in answer):
"All I ask of you
Is forever to remember me
As loving you.
All I ask of you
Is forever to remember me
As loving you.
"Ishq Allah
Mahabud Lillah
Ishq Allah
Mahabud Lillah."
As the infant looks trustingly
at the parents
who adore their child,
I will gaze at this world
and dare to receive
the laughing affection
of the world smiling back,
they eyes of my heart gazing back.
There is no separation.
Though the sun sinks, the leaves fall,
the squirrels take long naps,
though my energy ebbs,
the brightness of my mind
dims and stutters,
You gaze at me still
and hold me in unchanging affection.
Now, always and everywhere,
as fears of loss and failure
fill my mind with whispers:
may I lay them down
let them go -
wafting in the unchanging change -
leaving me simply here
in the spaciousness of light
companionship of squirrels
digging through fallen leaves.
