Baby
Baby it’s alright
Stop your crying
Now.
Nothing is here to stay.
Everything has to begin and end.
A ship in the bottle won’t sail.
All we can do is dream that a wind will blow us across the water.
A ship in the bottle set sail.
Baby it’s alright
stop your crying
Now.
There was a weakling man
who dreamed he was as strong as a hurricane
A ship in the bottle set sail
he took a breath and blew across the world.
He watched everything crumble.
He woke up a weakling again.
Some might tell you there is no hope in hand
Just because they feel hopeless
But you don’t have to be a thing like that.
You be a ship in a bottle set sail.
Baby it’s alright
Stop your crying, now
Its alright so stop your crying, now.
Be a ship in a bottle, set sail.
Dave Mathews from his album Some Devil, 2003
As I face my own death coming from confirmed stage four esophageal cancer these lines by Dave Mathews so speak to me. Understanding, as always, everything has to begin and end. But how to stay alive in that understanding?
And how striking Dave Mathew’s image of a person as a ship in a bottle! Stuck there. But then the idea of that ship somehow slipping loose and sailing on! A ship in the bottle set sail. How this encourages me in these days I have left to set sail big time. And, who knows, maybe there will sailing still to do when I leave the bottle of this earth time!
With death on my mind these days how impactful is a memory that comes back to me from a poetry writing session I was leading many years ago at The Cedars, a drug and alcohol recovery center. During that session a young man in recovery wrote a line in his poem on his addiction that slammed me: Death is THE fear.
What slammed me at the same time was the understanding of how easy it is to try and numb that fear of death by shutting down feelings and inducing a kind of living death, The substitution of one kind of death for another. Addiction as another kind of death.
Poets and song writers have lots to say about death and living deaths. Dave Mathew’s lines again:
Nothing is here to stay.
Everything has to begin and end.
A ship in the bottle won’t sail.
All we can do is dream that a wind will blow us across the water.
A ship in the bottle set sail.
And this remarkable and life affirming quote on death by a giant of 20th Century poetry, the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke:
Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love. . . . Life always says Yes and No simultaneously. Death (I implore you to believe) is the true Yea-sayer. It stands before eternity and says only: Yes.
Letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, Epiphany, 1923 by Rainer Maria Rilke from A Year With Rilke, Trans. Joanna Macy and Anita Burrows, HarperOne, 2009
I so feel the truth of this paradoxical yes these days. This passionate presence of love I am feeling from family and friends. Tasting the heightened vitality of being alive in the face of death.
And here is a poem by Asian-American poet, Li-Young Lee which addresses the idea of a “living death”.
After the Pyre
It turns out, what keeps you alive
as a child at mid-century
following your parents from burning
village to cities on fire to a country at war
with itself and anyone
who looks like you,
what allows you to pass through smoke,
through armed mobs singing the merits of a new regime, tooth for a tooth,
liberation by purification, and global
dissemination of the love of jealous gods,
coup d’etat, coup de grace, and the cooing of mothers
and doves and screaming men
and children caught in the pyre’s updraft,
what keeps you safe even among your own,
the numb, the haunted, the maimed, the barely alive,
tricks you learned to become invisible,
escapes you perfected, playing dead, playing
stupid, playing blind, deaf, weak, strong,
playing girl, playing boy, playing native, foreign,
in love, out of love, playing crazy, sane, holy, debauched,
playing scared, playing brave, happy, sad, asleep, awake,
playing interested, playing bored, playing broken,
playing “Fine, I’m just fine,” it turns out,
. .
now that you’re older
at the beginning of a new century,
what kept you alive
all those years keeps you from living.
Li-Young Lee from Behind My Eyes, W.W. Norton, 2008
What a surprise ending. After holding back the punch line again and again with the repetitions of variations on what keeps you alive he delivers this blow:
what kept you alive
all those years keeps you from living.
Ouch! I can relate to that. How not to numb out against fear and suffering. And here’s another American poet, Laura Kasischke talking about the masks we wear to get by!
Masks
At the grocery store today –
those meteors and angels, wise men and all
the beautiful hallucinations of December, wearing
the masks of the ordinary, the Annoyed, the Tired.
The Disturbed.
The Sane.
Only the recovering addict with his bucket and bell
has dared to come here without one.
He is Salvation.
His eyes have burned
holes in his radiance.
Instead of a mask, he has
unbuttoned his face.
Laura Kasischke from The Infinitesimals, Copper Canyon Press, 2014
This poem’s ending gobsmacks me: Instead of a mask, he has/ unbuttoned his face. If we could live like that. Not easy!
These poems and Dave Mathew’s song started me thinking about a poem by American poet Dorianne Laux, one that seems quite simple but one that seems to contain some good advice for living in a world where nothing lasts! What does she do? She pays attention to what’s around her. Savours it. Names it. That way makes it last a little longer. Her last lines are such a reminder why we must pay attention, and why it’s a great idea to write!
Plume
The old wheelbarrow aimed like a cannon
at the empty field, its bowed sides gold with rust,
half-filled with last night’s rain, a silver scrim
that shimmers when the wind passes over it,
the moves on to into the field, turning the wheat
to waves before it escapes into the trees.
And then the sound of the wind through leaves
like time’s low treble note, like the sticky substance
of the day abandoned, the minutes swept up
and dropped arbitrary, all along the forest floor.
And somewhere beyond the field, a poet sits
alone in her flimsy house, her pen squeaking
across a blank page, writing the screed
of her life, making her little path of words
and thoughts – the candle flame, beer froth,
the field of wheat, the rust, the sun –
writing down everything that doesn’t last.
Dorianne Laux from Plume Anthology, Pequod Books, 2012
How important that we have poets making a:
……………………… little path of words
and thoughts – the candle flame, beer froth,
the field of wheat, the rust, the sun –
writing down everything that doesn’t last.
Writing down everything that doesn’t last! Paying attention. What a way to stay here, now. Present to your life. Paul Celan, celebrated poet and tormented German-speaking Jewish witness to the holocaust, who took his own life aged fifty in 1970 , would agree. In a 1961 speech he said: “Attention, if you allow me a quote from Malebranche via walter Benjamin’s essay on Kafka, ‘attention is the natural prayer of the soul.’ ”
And when I read this I think of a line of poetry I keep inside me as a promise, a mantra, a line written by American poet, Linda Gregg: Eyes open, uncovered to the bone.
My eyes always open wider when I read Ellen Bass’s poem If You Knew. This thinking about death can be so life giving! And, now, even my own.
If You Knew
What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.
When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.
A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked a half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.
How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?
Ellen Bass from The Human Line, Copper Canyon Press, 2007
The last stanza of Bass’s poem is a cry to pay attention, to stay awake, to not slip inside a living death. Its lyricism, especially coming after the talky narrative of the preceding stanza’s, knocks me out!
Even before my cancer diagnosis I think of how often did I distract myself so I didn’t live with the realization I am soaked in honey, stung and swollen/ reckless, pinned against time!? Now, as I am fully immersed in this realization and by facing it, I try each day to taste life like a living force inside me. And that’s not to deny the waves of sadness that can overtake me. To hold the opposites as the cancer survivor, professor and podcaster Kate Bowler says when she declares: have a terrible beautiful day!
17 Comments
Dear Richard I have no words . You are such a gift and a light. You leave a kindly imprint in those you encounter and fan the flames of their own poetic lights.
So much love and gratitude to you, friend.
Anne-Marie
What a great day in Santa Fe when we met and became fast friends. Sending huge love to you and thanks for our friendship!
Several tears fall
Blake’s grains of sand
Follow you in gratitude
Caress your pen in hand.
Love this Linda. Thank you. Thank you.
Richard!
I love you like a brother,
How graceful, you walk this walk
Which you have not walked before
I thank you daily for bringing coming into my life
You bring me an example of courage and support
Som
Hi Richard
I am so sorry to hear about your cancer diagnosis. I met you over 8 years ago at The Cedars, where my son Nicholas was being treated for his drug addiction. I am happy to say, he is still clean and doing well. As a parent in the program, I will never forget the poetry writing session you gave us. It was so enlightening and powerful to get my feelings on paper in a poetic way. I will never forget how important that was for my healing and understanding of addiction. I have been following your blog posts ever since.
May your journey to the next dimension be a peaceful one, and may God bless you all the days of your life with love.
Thank you and have a terrible beautiful day!
Sincerely, Yvonne
Your loving comments mean the world. That Nicholas is clean and sober. And that you felt the healing power of your own words! Sending huge love back to you Yvonne.
Dear Richard,
Our mutual friend, Rosemary, introduced me to your blog. And it is quite possible that I met you in Calgary in autumn, the first snowfall of the season, when Padraig came to town. Context for my deep regard and respect for your work, your blog, your current path. I have a dear walking friend who is now on a similar camino. I gently introduce him to poets…and will save your post for a time when he might be receptive…it is all foreign and often foreboding territory, one I have called the “eldering landscape.”
Kindest regards, and a deep bow for your courage, your vulnerability here, and each and every terrible, beautiful day.
This eldering landscape. As Kate Bowler says. Terrible and beautiful. She turns thius into have a terrible beautiful day!
Richard, thunder rolled through the valley here as I read your words and all these wrenching poems–a divine voice rumbling: tâpwê–these words speak true. pay attention!
You love us all so richly. We are blessed by your love of poetic expression. I am so glad we know each other and feel your hand on my shoulder as I write this. Bless you and all who love you.
Huge blessing back to your deart heart!
Dearest Richard, Heidi was in touch today and shared news of you with me. So I came here, and found such beauty in your shared experience, such grace and courage. I remember fondly our times of poetry…honeymoon bay, Centrum, and poetry as prayer at that lovely church by the sea. Thank you for all you’ve opened my heart to over the years. May god hold you in the palm of her hand, dear one. Until we meet again. Love, Lesley-Anne
Huge love back to you L-A. Still so sorry we missed La Romita in 2020. To see yur poetry flourish and for you to be published by St Thomas. My great aunt’s husband was a priest there at the church te series is named after. And I was married there at St Thomas to my first wife . Please tryand get on Caringbridge again. I have made it less private.Catherine/
Richard, I know of you and your work, but don’t know you personally. It’s so generous of you to continue to share your observations and the wisdom that comes from a terminal diagnosis – after all, we all have a ‘terminal diagnosis.’
Dear Lorne: As I remember I came cross your comments on poetry years ago and you inspired me so. {lease feel free to follow my cancer blog on Caringbridge. I am so grateful to hear from you. Huge blessings on your life.
Dear brother. You have a way of using your gift of poetry to express true feelings abd understanding.
God bless you, Somae and family as you take this journey filled with many mixed emotions
Dear Big Sis! You made it to my blog. So thrilled. Huge love to you who have been one of my fierecest supporters all my life!