*** Klediments:

*** A mother’s day poem:

God’s Milk

Blessed mother’s day

God and all mothers

Your milk licked

Like salvation

From our lips

*** The Unforgiven:

*** At the same time that my 60 year old battered and broken heart was struggling for life in the hospital a few weeks ago (see earlier post) back home on the island a young seven year old friend of my grand daughter died suddenly from a genetic heart defect that no one even suspected that she had.  She was found dead in the family’s horse pasture after she had gone out riding alone.  At first it was thought that the horse had kicked her, but later it was confirmed that she died from heart failure.

*** In the hospital room next to mine a young 42 year old man was stuck down with a severe heart attack.  My wife Lynda noticed his mother in the waiting room.  The mother was old and frail and she was trembling with fear and grief.  This was the old woman’s only child.  My wife and daughters spent time with the mother, praying with her and for her son and trying to comfort her over the next few days.  The son died the day I was discharged.

*** Something that I have learned by spending time with the sick and the dying over the years is to never try to accomplish with money, logic, reasoning, or theology, what is better handled with poetry, tears, love, and whiskey.

*** Whoever lives or dies, “deserves” got nothing to do with it.

*** I quote this from Mother Teresa all the time but let me say it again:  “Christianity is not a matter of taking on extra pain. It's a matter of taking on the pain of being who we are, and patiently bearing with ourselves and the slow work of God.”  How much tribulation do we bring into this world by rejecting the pain of being who we are, the pain that is God’s portion for us, in favor of heroic programs, missions, and constructing theories of how to eliminate all suffering in the abstract.  The people I know who speak from the wisdom of their own pain seem to have the most to offer to others who are actually suffering. 

***

“Let's face it. We're undone by each other,” Judith Butler.

Let’s Face It.  A poem by Daniel Imburgia

Let's face it

We're undone by each other

Still bodies within breath

Inner fires quenched and cold

All our promises kept and broken

Now vaulted away

Enfolding our lover's hands

A rosary strung from archives 

Dispossessed

All these words come to nothing

My dear, my heart, my life, my love

My possession

Prospecting faces of the other

Thralled and bearing my grief as

Desires are undone and

Our narrative unravels

Weaving the clouds

A murmuration of starlings

As one being

Confuses the chanting Goshawks

Much obliged.

Progeny:  My daughter Alyssa and Grand daughter Milly 5 years ago at my last art show.

“I am a Catholic not like someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist, but like someone else would be an atheist.”   Flannery O’Connor

Klediments:

First a blessing from John O’Donohue (who many of you may know for his work with Anam Cara) for all my many friends who are sick, suffering loss, and grieving.

Beannacht / Blessing

On the day when

the weight deadens

on your shoulders

and you stumble,

may the clay dance

to balance you.

And when your eyes

freeze behind

the grey window

and the ghost of loss

gets in to you,

may a flock of colours,

indigo, red, green,

and azure blue

come to awaken in you

a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays

in the currach of thought

and a stain of ocean

blackens beneath you,

may there come across the waters

a path of yellow moonlight

to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

may the clarity of light be yours,

may the fluency of the ocean be yours,

may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow

wind work these words

of love around you,

an invisible cloak

to mind your life.” 

Let me just write a quick follow up to the posts below and about recent events as plainly as I can.  We older folks tend to spend too much time yakking about our illnesses, like old veterans recounting war stories, although these wars are usually fought against our own bodies.

I had a chance to experience something of ‘eyes freezing behind the grey window.’  That somewhat ‘routine’ heart “oblation” surgery I had on thursday came very close to killing me.  I am still home recovering and not yet sure what my final condition will be, but there are many reasons to be hopeful.  Without realizing it the surgeon burned a hole all the way through my heart, but post-surgery no one knew that I was bleeding internally.  In the recovery room I was in increasing pain and kept asking for more morphine but my breathing and heart rate kept declining so the nurses kept refusing.  The sack around my heart and then my entire chest cavity was filling with blood.  My lungs were collapsing and my heart was being suffocated.  It may very well be that my wife saved my life.  She opened my gown and made the nurses see my swelling and purple chest and convinced them that that was not normal and they finally called for a doctor.  I was watching my breathing, pulse, oxygen, on the monitors as they all fell lower and lower and I thought then that I was dying, and I was.  The chaplain was called to administer to me the Last Rites.  I wish that I could say that as I was approaching death I had some great spiritual experience to share with y’all, but as these things are reckoned, I didn’t (so no TV or book deals for me).  As I wrote below, I have been studying the practice of Japanese Death Poetry.  These are poems, usually haiku’s, that a poet writes just before the instant of death when perhaps one’s being inhabits both this world and whatever other worlds there are.  I tried as best I could, but I could not compose a single line of poetry.  The doctor arrived and ordered me to be immediately intubated (breathing tube) while they tried to figure out what the problem was.  As they were waiting for an ultrasound machine the Catholic chaplain arrived and administered to me the Last Rites (they have a special, small, dissolving, communion wafer that is just perfect for someone with a tube down their throat.  Sometimes those Roman Catholics really have their crap together!).  To be honest all of this is very hazy.  I was heavily drugged and in great pain.  And although I have no profound near-death experience to recount, I can at least say that I was not angry with God, the doctors, or anybody else.  I was afraid but I was not terrified.  Maybe that was because of Jesus, maybe it was the Morphine, only God knows.  I was very sad for my beloved wife Lynda who was standing next to me and was in such great anguish, and my children who were rushing to the hospital.  I remember the doctor saying we don’t have time to take him to the O R and then I saw him pierce the center of my chest with something.  Blood gushed out and I remember a nurse saying something like, ‘Gah! that’s a lot of blood!‘  And that’s it.

I have a hunch that this is a very ordinary sort of experience and that thousands die in similar (and others in much more terrible ways) every day.  I am no one special.  I have read many of the great spiritual works of Christianity and even those of many other religions but at this crucial moment in my life/death it seems that nothing extraordinarily spiritual happened to me.  I am home slowly healing.  I am sore, a bit depressed, thankful, confused, immensely grateful for my family and friends, sad, discouraged, and I reckon all of this is pretty normal.

I did write this poem this morning though.  Of course, technically it’s not a death poem, just a way to try and bring some thoughts to the surface and encounter them.

Extreme Unction

I won’t tell people what to believe anymore

From now on any light that we find

We will have to find together

And when the darkness comes

We must fall together

And break together

This is a cross worth bearing

One another

All those crosses that we build for ourselves

And for others

Are a colossal dead weight that 

Not even a Superman could shoulder

It is late in the day

And the damage done

I can not undo

I am completely surrounded by love

But utterly alone

I am helpless

And I despise being a cross

That others must bear

This is my breaking

This is my shame

And my gift

As much as I am resistant to the call of Jesus to “take up my cross,” I find that I am maybe even more resistant to being someone else’s cross.  Sometimes we might well prefer the pain and suffering (and the glory and attention) of the suffering servant, to the ignominiousness and humiliation of being the helpless burden needing a diaper change.

Way below I once wrote about how much I respect the work of chaplains.  One chaplain in particular wrote about how in all her years of ministry to the seriously ill no one ever wanted to talk about theology or philosophy.  My own experiences being with the sick and dying pretty much bears this out.  Interestingly though, my good friend and dear brother Johnny V P came to the hospital on the night of my greatest distress with a copy of Heidegger’s “Zollikon Seminars: Protocols - Conversations - Letters.”  We had just barely started reading and beginning to discuss it a bit the previous week when I ended up in the hospital.  I don’t have any comments on the Zollikon yet but I was reading the book, “The New Heidegger” this morning and came across this interesting citation:           

“In the Zollikon Seminars (6 July 1965) Heidegger quotes Wiener’s definition

of the human – a definition he naturally wants to explain historically and chal-

lenge philosophically – as an information device, whose singularity, namely,

language, can be computed and controlled.  As we shall see, Heidegger’s

interpretation of the human being, and of its relation to language, is radically

different, if not altogether opposed. According to Heidegger, the human being

is human only to the extent that he ‘understands’ being (as presence), that is,

only to the extent that he stands in the openness of being. Being human means

to be this openness” (Pg 104).

Several things strike me about this passage but let me just focus on that part that states that ‘we are human beings to the extent that we stand in openness to being, and to be human is to be this openness.‘  I very much like this way of expressing our humanness although I can not say that I fully accept it.  Yet I think that maybe this close encounter with my mortality has perhaps helped me to dwell in this openness more.  Even though I don’t think that we have to suffer to experience more of this openness, I do think that there are all kinds of experiences that may serve to help us towards greater openness to Being (even good old fashioned church-going, sacraments, works of justice, mercy, and charity, etc.) but our frail bodies and mortality confront us in ways that our speculating and intellectualizing about various public policy alternatives, political systems, speculative theologies, etc., often don’t.  That is, I can ignore the hellfire drones zipping overhead and the dead Bangladeshi garment workers under the collapsed death-trap of a factory building, but I can’t ignore a hemorrhaging hole in my heart.  And just like many of those dead and surviving Bangladeshi women, I now know something of what it feels like to have your breath crushed out of your chest.  If that experience can’t move me towards more openness to being, to the Spirit, to Jesus, to others suffering, then what will?  I do not deserve life more than they did.  Indeed, I think it could be better argued that I ‘deserve‘ life much much less.  To be honest I am dealing with a bit of a case of survivor guilt over the recent deaths of so many great brothers and sisters who were such exceptional and talented people, ministers, and servants of God that I keep wondering when God is going to get around to figuring out that the angel of death has been screwing up down here!

Let me end by recommending the new book by Christian Wiman (one of my favorite poets) called “My Bright Abyss,” and by posting one of his unfinished poems:

My Bright Abyss

My God my bright abyss

into which all my longing will not go

once more I come to the edge of all I know

and believing nothing believe in this

God bless y’all and much obliged.

I. 

A poem by Daniel Imburgia (dedicated to my new friend 94 year old Leo Wetmanski who once lived in the land of Prussians but now lies in a hospital bed next to me in this improbable city called Bellevue Washington.  This really is not a place to die when Konigsburg is available.  Isn’t it a pity though, what has happened to history).

Chaplains Rounds

How can I respect a priest

Who has never cried with Polish tears

Or the writer who hasn’t wept like

A pilgrim crossing the Russian steppe

Sedge and feathergrass extending farther

than a breaking heart can break for it

Teach me about your god when you have

Hacked at this frozen sod with a broken cross 

To bury your children in

Rosebud or Kaliningrad 

If beauty will not save this world

Then tell me, how do we save ourselves

After we have filled the crematoriums

Obedient to ideals of perfection

Do not offer me communion unless

You have eaten the shew bread of David

And I can feel the wounds in your palms

Better is the fear and silent loneliness than

Soft preachers hands

Shuffling the pages of his bible

Like a deck of cards

II.

Boston Beans

They say that the day before the explosion the bomber acted completely normal.  He kept to all of his routines; gym, work, lunch with friends, drinks after work, TV with the wife in bed.  No one noticed anything out of the ordinary.  I think that it is this seeming normalcy that so often vexes us.  We are more psychologically comfortable with deranged killers dressed all in black with dark skin and foreign accents.  I have the same questions that so many others have: how could someone who appears so normal carry out such acts of brutal violence against so many innocent people?  What could ever justify in one’s mind this kind of impersonal killing from a safe distance?  What kind of religion could sanction or promote such a profound disregard for human life?  Wouldn’t someone who could kill this indiscriminately have to be insane?   But if we name this a pathology, a mental illness, aren’t we letting the individual off the hook, maybe even taking away some of his own humanity by treating his actions as symptoms of a disease over which he has no control?  I think that to hold these killers guilty and accountable may in a sense restore to them some measure of humanity.  This does not rule out forgiveness and grace, indeed it compels us to both for every act of killing defines what it means to be human, but so does every act of forgiveness.

Of course, in our search for answers maybe we will have to look farther and deeper than just the individual who presses a button.  Mass killers are products of families, communities, countries, cultures.  It is understandable that we want see where the killer lives, talk to family and friends, tour the neighborhood, read up on the history of his country, understand his religion.  But, if we are honest with ourselves, part of what we are looking for is something that reassures us that the killer is different than we are.  That even if we were raised in his family, in his neighborhood, in his country, in his religion, we would never have pushed a button that could kill innocent human beings.  Otherwise how can we hold one person accountable for as act where responsibility and guilt seem so widespread?  We are so desperate to believe that there is some intrinsic difference between us and the killers that I think it makes us vulnerable to our own mythologizing, about ourselves, and about the killers, and that makes confronting the truth all the more difficult.

I wonder if these kinds of killers can ever come to some sort of reckoning with the consequences of their actions.  Will they ever be made to see the bloody bodies or expose themselves to the grief and suffering of survivors  I want to believe that there is a indestructible part of them that knows that they have done evil and will evolve in time to confront their guilt.  I want to believe that no matter how depravedly indifferent they appear, that there is nothing in this world that can totally obliterate a persons essential humanity.  I want to believe that anyone can be redeemed.  It terrifies me to think otherwise.

 Obliged.       

CAT SCAN

Alien life forms run amok
Colonies of fast-breeding pioneers
But who really owns this territory
Is it just a numbers game
First come first serve
Or survival of the fittest

The indigenous light back-fires
Leaving only scorched earth and burned flesh
Ahead of the encroaching forces
Silent wars rage and the
Victims of these woeful massacres are
Strewn about the battlefields of our cavities
Yet we are so often oblivious

Is it merely thinking that “I AM”
Or the will to resist non-existence
Flourishing in the tiniest little quark
That is the seed of conquest
And this compulsion for survival

Aboriginals can take some satisfaction
That if the invaders vanquish their host
This terrene habitation will be purified by fire
Enemies and friends, bowels and hearts are
Indistinguishable among the ashes
This is reckoning and not Judgement
The fire judges
Love reckons not  

***  I wrote in previous posts about Japanese death poems; the practice of writing a last poem just before one dies.  Since then I’ll admit I’v gotten a bit twitchy.  I always carry paper and pen and I start composing a death poem every time a car honks at me at an intersection or I get a tiny twinge in my chest.  I wrote that poem above just before getting my heart scanned in an MRI machine on thursday even though this procedure is virtually risk free.  Really, in an earthquake or terrorist bombing, tucked away inside that metal tube, I would have probably been the only survivor!

As it turns out the most challenging part of the experience was not being trapped inside the MRI machine but the music I was forced to endure.  Among the choices offered to me I picked the classical music station.  However, the MRI technician named Mandy screwed up and piped into my headphones an hour’s worth of contemporary christian music “by accident.”  “Ooops” she said and smiled when I asked her about it after the scan was done.  I have a hunch that Mandy does this kind of thing intentionally though, and that she thinks of this as some sort of ministry.  A scruffy looking old guy comes in, tattooed with a long braided beard, and maybe a bad heart, and she starts thinking that this might be this guys last chance to hear about Jesus!  In a way it’s sort of sweet and innocent; in another way its kind of creepy and frightening.

I had never heard of him before but I was forced to listen to pop christian ‘super star’ Chris Tomlin’s #1 hit “Whom Shall I Fear” Twice!  The words go like this:

“You hear me when I call
You are my morning song
Though darkness fills the night
It cannot hide the light”

Nothing wrong with those lyrics.  Sort of comforting really for someone having a bunch of medical tests done.  I want to believe that God is hearing my prayers in between the grunching and tweaked out screeching noises that the MRI machine makes.  Its comforting to know that even completely alone inside this dark metal cave that God’s light can find me.  Thank you Jesus.  Next verse:

“Whom shall I fear
You crush the enemy
Underneath my feet
You are my sword and shield
Though troubles linger still”

Hmmm...well yes the language is bibleish and Psalmy.  But I guess I don’t tend to focus as much on the metaphors of God as a Terminator stomping through a blackened wasteland of human skeletons; the skulls of sinners pulverized beneath his sandaled cyborg feet, and his fiery X-ray eyes targeting hearts full of secret sins.  And just who are these “enemies” of God anyway?  Sinners? (I’m one), unbelievers? (yeah that’s me too sometimes), enemies of america? (I’v been called that), heretics? (oy vey, but then what about Jews?).  No, I think King David, like so many kings often have, confused his own enemies with God’s enemies.  Still, it’s good to believe that God has my back.  But when I turn to find God in times of trouble, what I encounter is not a gladiator but another broken body like mine, only this one is hanging on a cross.  The next verse continues:  

“I know who goes before me
I know who stands behind
The God of angel armies
Is always by my side”

Maybe it’s just me, but anymore when I hear about “angel armies” I often associate those armies with republicans, George Bush, and the shock and awesome power of the american military machine.  I picture them all buddied up with that sword-wielding Jesus of the book of revelations to cleanse the earth of relativist deconstructionists, Lady GaGa and her LGBT loving little monsters, Bono, and the activists Pussy Riot.  But maybe I’m just reading too much of my own fear and ideological biases into these lyrics.  Remembering gentle sister Mandy and how she smiled at me as I emerged from the MRI tube,  It’s hard to imagine her as someone who sings about crushing God’s enemies (or imagine her shepherding Jews and gypsies into gas chambers to the music of Hillsong).  I may see Mandy again next week.  If I do I might tell her that I have prayed for Jesus to be in my heart many times, but I don’t expect that’s something that will show up in an MRI scan, thank God.

Obliged.

p.s., I'm thinking of doing a whole series of paintings that explore our innards via CAT scans and MRI's like the one above.

Klediments:

***  “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”  Novalis (yeah, maybe, sometimes).

***  It seems that many of us may have forgotten Leonard Peltier. (If you don’t know who LP is you may not want to bother reading any further).  It is understandable that other concerns would crowd Leonard out of our awareness.  War is again looming (North Korea, Iran, South Ossetia), and any of these wars could escalate and result in the total destruction of human life on this planet.  Unemployment has risen now for two months in a row.  I have also noticed that women’s *wardrobe malfunctions* are a daily feature of many of the on-line news sites that I read and peeping a nipple ranks right up there with tracking North Korean mobile missile launchers.  There is no use in feeling guilty about all of this, it is hard to really care about strangers, and I don’t know how much good it does anyway.  My wife and I have corresponded with, supported, donated to, protested for, and written letters to politicians and BOP officials supporting Leonard  Peltier for 25 years.  I confess that I have lost hope that he will ever get out of prison alive.

All this was brought to mind again when I was looking through my poetry library for a friend and I came across Leonard’s 1999 book “Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance.”  It was then that I remembered for how long I had forgotten Leonard.  And that I have also forgotten many other suffering people and worthy causes that I vowed to remember.  I am wondering if maybe that is what my old age is going to be about, unfaithful forgetting, remembrance, repentance.   Here is the first poem in Peltier’s book:

Doing time creates a
demented darkness of my
own imagination

Doing time does this thing
to you.  But, of course, you
don’t do time

You do without it.  Or
rather, time does you.

Time is a cannibal that
devours the flesh of your
years

Day by day, bite by bite.

Leonard had been in prison for 22 years when he wrote that.  And he has been in prison 14 years since then.  One can check on any federal prisoners status at this website:

 http://www.bop.gov/iloc2/InmateFinderServlet?Transaction=NameSearch&needingMoreList=false&FirstName=leonard&Middle=&LastName=peltier&Race=U&Sex=U&Age=&x=0&y=0

Leonard will be eligible for parole in the year 2040.  He will be 95 years old.

***  The procedures and protocols for visiting day at the Washington State penitentiary in Monroe are daunting and dehumanizing.  First, all of the visitors are crowded into the induction area and watched over by armed guards and patrolled by drug and firearm sniffing police dogs.  The children alternate between being bored and scared.  Small children are usually happy at first when they see the dogs coming, but as the dogs get closer and the guards snap at the kids and tell them not to touch the animals the kids see that the eyes of the dogs are not friendly and they start to cower behind their mothers.  The dogs are prisoners too.  Everyone is scanned and searched and often the women are taken into a room for cavity searches.  Of course smuggling goes on all the time in all kinds of ways.  sometimes it is the guards themselves that are the smugglers, but on visiting day even a baby’s diapers are opened up and checked.  Baby bottles and formula confiscated.  All our pockets are turned inside out.

This is really hard on those inmates trying to maintain some sort of family life.  Most prisoners are poor, and so are their families.  It’s hard for a woman by herself to schlepp 2 young kids on a long series of bus rides from Seattle to Monroe.  Having to explain all about the guns and guards, and why visiting this virtual stranger should be important to them.  Once visitors are allowed to enter the visiting area the family’s table might be right next to some sort of gangster having virtual chair sex with his woman.  Maybe at the table on the other side sits a white-supremacist who keeps making obnoxious remarks about mud people or whatever.  Some visiting rooms are segregated for just this reason, but Monroe’s wasn’t.  It was always the family tables where everyone was really trying to act normal that saddened me most.  Dad was asking about homework and what’s new at school.  Mom is trying to smile and not burden her husband with money or home problems that he can’t possibly fix.  Usually by the time the kids are 10 or 12 or so they hardly know ‘Dad’ anymore and they either stop visiting or else just sit quietly and answer every question with a shrug.  Prisoners long for and dread visiting days.

I worked with the Black Prisoners Caucus and most all the inmates were lifers.  At the time a life sentence meant that the first parole hearing came only after serving a minimum of 13 years.  And parole is rarely granted the first time.  Not many families survive prison.

***  This is an old poem/song I wrote doing time while waiting to get through the visiting room.

The Visitation

What came you out to see
A reed shaken by the wind
A prisoner and penitent
In a penitentiary
The C O’s and the dogs
Can smell that somethings wrong
My baby won’t stop crying
No matter what the song

What came you out to see
A man in fine arraignment
Lifers and short timers
Hold their friends and families
Orifices have been searched and seen
Declared legally clean
My mother won’t stop crying
My fathers long disowned me

What came you out to see
A prophet and what more
Saints and sinners being punished
Shut away with lock and key
There are no secrets here within
Every soul’s turned inside out
My lover won’t stop crying
My heart is filled with doubt

What came you out to see
A man of miracles and faith
Or a prisoner on death row
Who’s been denied his final plea
His children are all strangers
Every man has turned his hand
Against the killer of his brother
Cursed is he and cursed his land

What came you out to see
A man broken and ashamed
Trained for taking orders
Unfit for life with decent company
No touching skin allowed
And every word is written down
Faces changing year to year
As the man you knew is drowned

What came you out to see
Someone with skin black or brown
Who crosses deadly borders
Transgressing walls of poverty
Every soul does time alone
Not just the ones in solitary
But we will try to keep some peace
For just one hour on visiting day

What came you out to see
A man atoning for his sins
A scapegoat or a monster
Untouchable unclean
Broken down to smaller pieces
Brothers hardly recognize
The picture in their mind begins to streak
Wait with him for just an hour
Watch justice roll down like dice
Innocence has a price

***  This would be a good place to go on a righteous rant about the prison industrial complex, but I won’t, at least not here.  That sort of ineffectual prattling is more suited for my facebook wall.  Poor people go to jail, always been that way, and it’s getting worse.  I think that if your interested then watch this video put out by the BOP (bureau of prisons) about career opportunities within the prison system.  Most everything you need to start understanding the relationship between capitalism and incarceration is in this 3 minute video.

http://www.bop.gov/common/movies/Corrections_sm.wmv

Leonard wrote at the end of his his book.  “I don’t know how to save the world. I don’t have the answers or The Answer. I hold no secret knowledge as to how to fix the mistakes of generations past and present. I only know that without compassion and respect for all of Earth’s inhabitants, none of us will survive—nor will we deserve to.”  And then he ended with this poem:

Sometimes
In the shadowed night
I become spirit
The walls, the bars, the gratings dissolve into light
and I unloose my soul
and fly through the inner darkness of my being
I become transparent
a bright shadow
a bird of dreams singing from the tree of life.

Leonard has spent 14 years of shadowed nights since he wrote that.  I pray his soul is loosed.  Obliged.

Saturday In Hell  (daniel imburgia)

Let’s stop pretending that more words
Can change anything now
Even if we had faith once
Most wait their entire life
Wrapped up tight inside their tombs
For someone to command them
Come forth

It’s not the harrowing words
Themselves (if they have ‘selves’)
More like the hydraulics of
A great reservoir of power
Breaching the dike because
What gets funneled though spigots
Can not contain the force of flow
Against all our calculations
The numbers lied

Ashes and dust are more than the
Reckoning of bodily fluids
Signing the history of fire
Our own dried tears testify
No combination of
Incantations or sing-spells
Will roll the stones away
Nor lure us staggering into the light
Still bound in bloody rags


The painting (8 feet by 40 in.) has many images reproduced from Jack Kerouac’s journals (he was a really good artist as well as writer) and some images are from Paul Klee’s angels, as well as a few of my own embellishments.  It hangs, 'in situ,' on the side of an old shed in the woods behind my house.

Blessings, and obliged.  

The face of the Virgin Mary after attack in 1972

Klediments:

*** John 20:17, “Noli me tangere” (touch me not).

Another of my poems for lent.  The subject is Michelangelo’s Pieta, one of my favorite sculptures.  Unfortunately, after many assaults over the years one has to view this masterpiece from a distance and through protective glass (which may be the way we prefer to encounter Jesus).

Bullet-Proof

The authorities in Rome

Erected a barrier of bullet-proof glass

Around Michelangelo’s Pieta

Still today some become so enraged

At this dead and pierced through little Jew

They try to smash him with hammers and bullets

Even as he lay in his mother’s arms

He can never be be dead enough

To please his enemies, and

Many of his friends

***  Lazlo Toth, a Hungarian living in Australia, is the name of the hammer wielding assailant who attacked the sculpture during Whitsunday Mass in 1972 while yelling out, "I am Jesus Christ risen from the dead.”  After several blows, Toth bashed off the Virgin's arm at the elbow, knocked off a chunk of her nose, and chipped one of her eyelids.

His roommate in Rome, American Danny Bloom, said of him, “He didn't strike me as a Jesus Christ impersonator, and he never talked to me of such things. We spent much of our days drinking coffee, going to parties at night and drinking beer and wine, and Lazlo often played his guitar. He told me was from Hungary, that he was a geologist and that he had spent a long time out in the outback of Australia for his job.  He had a goatee, and he looked like a Hungarian poet. Nice guy. Longish hair, as was the style in those days, but not a hippy at all.  One thing I remember about Lazlo is that he always carried the Bible with him. We didn't talk about religion very much, other than as people often do, is there a God, what is the meaning of life, stuff like that, late at night, drinking wine at outdoor cafes in Trastevere. I liked him. He was friendly, intelligent, articulate.” 

Toth was apprehended and charged with crimes that would have brought a nine-year prison sentence, had he been convicted. In the end the court found him insane.  Italian psychiatrists claimed that Toth had the IQ of a genius.  His treatment included being subjected to 12 rounds of electro-shock treatment. After two years Toth was deported back to Australia.

*** Jesus:  "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another”  (John 13:34).

These are some of the most distressing words Jesus ever spoke.  Because we just can’t do this thing, love as God loves (except, possibly, for Mother T and Dorothy D).  We can sell everything we own, we can turn the other cheek, we can hug lepers (or pay others to hug them for us) all of which may leave our egos in tact, but we can not love as God loves, and sometimes when I read this ‘commandment’ it makes me frustrated or depressed.  And sometimes a bit pissed off.  Maybe if Jesus would have put it like one of my other teachers, the highly esteemed Kabbalist Baal HaSulam:  “Love one another as much as you can, as much as you love yourselves. Sympathize with your friend’s adversity, and rejoice in his joy as much as you can” (Baal HaSulam, Pri Hacham, A Sage’s Fruit, Letters, p. 54.).  This is a challenging teaching form HaSulam, but it’s doable. If only Jesus would have been a bit more realistic about our capabilities and cut us some slack.  

‘Take up your own cross...as much as you can.’ 

But no.  Jesus sounds a bit like CIA chief Russell Crowe admonishing his agent Leonardo DiCaprio in the middle-east spy thriller “Body of Lies.”  DiCaprio seems to be losing focus on the big picture (securing the power of the american empire) and starts allowing his concern for actual human beings to compromise his mission (killing suspected ‘terrorists’ or whoever).  

DiCaprio:  When they find him, they are gonna torture him and they are gonna kill him.

Crowe:      You gotta decide which side of the cross you're on. I need nailers, not hangers.

DiCaprio:  Decision's already done. I'm bringing him in.

Crowe:      Ain't nobody innocent in this shit. Okay?

Nailers or hangers?  Surely there are more options available than that?

***  A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music. People crowd around the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul.”  Kierkegaard (?).

Woman of Many Sorrows

Above is a simple, small (12" X 20") Icon of Mary Magdalene I call “The Woman of Many Sorrows,” that I just completed.  It depicts Mary as she weeps at the foot of the cross.  Below is perhaps my last lenten poem:

Noli Me Tangere

I.  Chorus of Women:  

From Eden to Gethsemane we have borne unjust shame

But this time there was no woman in the garden to blame

The serpent silently coiled around the minds of weaker men

The serpents enemies were Mary and Mary from Magdalene

II. Mary Magdalene:  

I had tarried on the road from Emmaus to Jerusalem

Got lost on the far side of the valley of tombs

When I was told, when I knew what I had always known

I ran the length from the gate of lions to the place of skulls

But when I found you, you were already spiked to the sky

Where were your brothers, uncles, and sons

Where were your two fathers?

Had I been there in the garden

I would not have slept

I would not have left you alone

I would not have ‘put up’ my sword

I would have destroyed the temple to save you

I would have screamed at those cowards and fools

I would have fought the emperor and his soldiers 

I would have blasphemed the fraudulent priests of Hashem

I would have torn down the city of Jerusalem stone by stone 

I would have rent the veil and left the sacred places desolate

I would have answered your prayers

I would have have held your bruised face in my hands

I would have wiped the blood and tears from your eyes

I would have given my life for you

But I was not there in the garden that night

There were no mothers, sisters, daughters, aunts, grandmothers,

There were no women in the garden that night

And still only the only doubters may touch you  

Obliged

Klediments:  Popes, Poets, and Poverty.  

***  Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.  James: 5. v. 4.

Wherever you see poor working you will find angels gathering their sweat and tears like diamonds.

*** I Don’t Know What To Say. (by saint Dom Helder Camara). 

If I could
I would leave dropping money
quietly
in the poor pockets
fallen of fatigue and of hunger
on banks of abandoned gardens.
If I could
I would leave filling of rest and of dreams
the unslept nights of the desperate ones.
If I could
- oh! if I could -
it would drive away of the earth the distrust
that tarnish the clearest glances
and turns cloudy the cleanest horizons...
I don't know what I say, Lord!
If you leave on earth
the poverty, the insomnia and the distrust
it is because they translate a message
ciphered for the men
and they don't enter just by chance
in the life of anybody.
Rio de Janeiro, 04/25/48

I lived half my childhood/teen years doing migrant field and orchard work for minimum wage or less.  I don’t idealize poverty or work that grinds down the body and soul.  Yet, against all our reckoning, ‘blessed are the poor.’  The 30 year old painting above was inspired by fellow workers in the field North of Los Angeles.

*** Langston Hughes

“Hang yourself poet,
In your own words
Otherwise, you are dead.”

*** Meeting the new Pope (same trailer park, different trailer?).

                                  *hugs* (((THE POOR))) *hugs*

"And those words came to me: the poor, the poor. Then I thought of Francis of Assisi. Then I thought of all the wars.... Francis is also the man of peace. That is how the name came into my heart: Francis of Assisi. For me, he is the man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves and protects creation; these days we do not have a very good relationship with creation, do we? He is the man who gives us this spirit of peace, the poor man … How I would like a Church which is poor and for the poor!"  Pope Francis.

You know, being poor is something that we (the rich, church) could actually pull off.  Of course there’s a lot of sacrifice involved and it will probably hurt like hell, but it isn’t like turning water into wine or walking on water.  Getting poor is pretty simple, even for people without any faith.  Pope Francis and many others, including many of my ambiguously 'spiritual' leftist friends, seem to sort of wistfully ruminate about "The Poor," as if blessed poverty is some unattainable ideal like world peace, when really it’s as achievable as dolphin-free tuna.

In the book/movie “The Shoes of the Fisherman” the Pope begins the process of really divesting the catholic church of it’s wealth and earthly power to actually feed hungry people (and of course by doing so the church shares more in the power of God which increases through solidarity with the poor.  This is why Mother Teresa, and not the Pope, is the most powerful person in the church for me).  But it’s not just the vatican’s religious industrial complex that needs divestment, that’s too easy of a target and becomes just another excuse for all the rest of us to do nothing.  How many times have I heard/read commentators in the last week saying crap like ‘well, let’s hope Pope Francis lives up to his name sake.‘  WTF?  Francis has already taken a vow of poverty, what about the rest of us? Of course there is something we fear even more than sacrificial charity, it is redistributive justice, because sacrifice without love is driven by ego, but just as true, "Love without justice is baloney" (Cardinal Sin of the Philippines).  How long will it be before disillusionment begins with this new Pope and we realize that we are just the same old unfaithful, broken, hypocritical people we were before all the white smoke?

I’m also wondering when riding a bus become a new sign of sainthood or a charism of the church?  If only the rich young ruler had shown Jesus his bus pass!  Maybe he could have hung on to the rest of his investment portfolio.  Then again, Oscar Romero, another bus riding bishop once said before he was martyred for actually serving the poor and challenging the rich, “We must overturn so many idols, the idol of self first of all, so that we can be humble, and only from our humility can we learn to be redeemers, can learn to work together in the way the world really needs. Liberation that raises a cry against others is no true liberation. Liberation that means revolutions of hate and violence and takes away lives of others or abases the dignity of others cannot be true liberty. True liberty does violence to self and, like Christ, who disregarded that he was sovereign becomes a slave to serve others.”  Is Pope Francis really calling for us to do “violence to ourselves,” to become slaves of others, and to radically dispossess ourselves of our property or is this just fanciful inauguration rhetoric, and all to quickly the “church” will get back to the business of the conformation and maintenance of securing the power of it’s religious super-structure?  Our beloved Kabbalist Tzadik Benjamin warned us against this very danger in his sixth thesis on history:  “In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist.”  Ad maiorem Dei.

*** So that brings us to the next in my lenten poem series.  It’s sort of themed around Mardi Gras so I’m about a month late, sorry.

Fat Tuesday

I.

Surmounting limitations of poor drainage
New Orleans persistently clings
To it’s Acadian heritage of octaroon of parentage
Situated like an open zipper below the bible belt
New Orleans prospers on the yearly tithes
Of pietist Middle-america
Rome having cut a deal with the devil
Bargained away one week before lent
So that early each spring, like a fat ox
Paraded through the streets of Paris Tuesday
As groundhogs stagger from sodden huts
Dormant sap still frozen in their trunks
That great pulsing artery of river starts pumping
Down to the gulf from distant capillaries
As once it travelled Puritan and Huguenot
Into virgin frontiers today it
Barges oxygen blue zydeco and citronella sweat
Glands budding on danced out pagan skin shines
Swelling from every costume ripped and torn open seams
Come busting out reeling civil servants and ranch hands
Career women counter help feed-store hay-buckers
Combination tractor trailer migrants and junior college deans
Barmaids with chafed elbows and short order cooks
Pumping gas porno star bus driving seed potato plunk-down
Roustabouts and oiled up steel-mill workers
Pentecostal bail bondsmen skinny white boys burning hot
As orange flames for more white powder and all of them just
One mask away from a double vein pop to the farthest shore
And back into the arms of  their black mother saviours
Redeeming the son’s and daughter’s of foreign masters
Guelphs, Gibellines, Wallensians and Cathars
Successive waves  of covered wagon proxies
Until everything wild is annually subdued
And everyone is back to nicely multiplying
Each according to it’s own nature
Plough-shares cutting deeply into furrowed thighs
Absorbing, swelling with more seed each season the
Tectonic spread zone dangerously expanding
Between available and allowable meanings
The face side and faced side of a carnival mask
Until flowing like liquid magma
Onto those big easy streets
Squandering the harvest of a years virtue
To fall as far as half the angels
And half as far as not returning

II.

On average the city sits 5 feet below the water line
By law burial of the dead occurs above ground
Metaphors of actual burials
Visible genealogies and timely
Reminders of bodily corruption
During great floods buoyant coffins float freely
About the Queen city transgressing all boundaries
Between caste and color, haves and have nots
Signified by Canal street the main binary causeway
In every american city regardless of water where
Life is lived on the dividing line of habitable oppositions
The face side and faced side of this place or any place
East where the Creoles first settled
West where later arriving whites invested
North around horseshoe bend
Where the blacks gave early warning that yellow fever
Was breaking from the Mississippi towards Lake Pontchartrain
Heading towards the peach groves of Lake Shore Vista
And Gentilly Terrace located seven miles and
That many virtues from Gretna, Harvey and Terrytown
Parts of the city you already know without knowing
Without having ever been there or anyone explaining it to you
Gentilly Terrace or Terrytown, you just know
Habitual as boulevards changing costumes
Crossing the canal to Tchouptitoula
Where Royal changes to Saint Charles and then to Basin
Basin becomes Elk place before merging into Loyola then it
Becomes Earhart, for just a dint, before
Promoting itself to Simon Bolivar
Keep and eye on the signs
They tell you where you are
And who you are
Gentilly Terrace or Terrytown
You just know.

III.

Our Lady of Holy Cross
Looks down with affection and care
On Storytown and Jelly-Roll Morton
And all those hookers troiling the Vieux Carre’
The Te Deum rises through the fog of scarlet fever hearts
A music only the instruments themselves understand
A full seventh above the installment card laughter
That evens the pain out over 12 sufferable months
One third of a continent deposits it’s sediment on these streets
From it’s headwaters at Itasca Minnesota
Gathering slag and speed from Minneapolis/St. Paul
Mercury and sulfur from the quad cities
Wit and wisdom from Hannibal Missouri
And just below St. Louis outside of Cape Giardeaux
between Thebes and Ware (pronounced Wahray)
On a gentle bend in the Mississippi
The federal marker commemorating the trail of tears
A destination worth a trip in itself some time
But we’re caught in the current sweeping past Memphis
The water gaining stride on the longest stretch
From Graceland to Vicksburg like many Southern cities
it was starved into surrendering, it’s salvation give over to
General Grant who offered a host of sacrifices to Our Lady
Gathering a great victory of bodies into the river
Floating them down across all dividing lines
As far away from remembrance
As the sins of righteous meeting
The baptized souls of Baton Rouge
Mixing in and carried down, down
Flooding through the delta
Pouring onto the streets of the French quarter
Slushing, oozing, and slurping over
A saline tide seeking it’s own level
Until the cauterizing sun draws up to heaven
All the sinful infected moistures into herself
Forgiveness scorched into the hearts of repentant sinners
Until all that remains is the leaven of the pharisees
Pumped each Easter over the Bonnet Carre spillway
Into the available and infinite sea

Obliged.

Klediments:   Death....

"I still cling to Christ and trust in my doctors and nurses. Ever onward to victory! We will live and overcome!" -- Hugo Chavez's last tweet.

The painting above (40X30 in.) is of the 13 th. Station of the Cross,  “Jesus is taken down from the cross.”  It it the second piece I have done where I sculpted parts of a body and had them break out of the picture plane.

*** Another of my lenten poems:

Vivicate 

We forget that we rose from the dead once already

Through bloody mucus and love cries

That light also brought pain to our eyes

It took years to get on our feet after that

Three days later and

Who would even recognize themselves

That first look on our faces is always so...

Astonished, that’s the word I would choose to call it

Unless you know of a better one

By now the bleeding has stopped

The wounds have closed up, scarred over

Bodies have been cleaned up and dressed

Made ready to meet the whole of the family

So many kinds of things have been forgotten

In the drama of it all.  But what’s important 

Even if our names were given before we were

The very idea of us is still worth mentioning

**** I wrote a while back about studying a book on Japanese death poetry.  The Idea of these poems and poets was to write a poem at the very moment of one’s death, with one foot in each world so to speak, and to possibly leave behind some wisdom to share with the living.  The poems are not composed ahead of time but must really be written just as one is in the act of dying (at least that is the theory, I don’t know who polices such things for the Japanese and just where the cut-off points are or the technicalities around suicide).  Perhaps the ‘death tweet‘ can become the same sort of thing for the 21 st. century?  In the meantime here are some traditional selections:

Sunao’s death poem.  He  died in 1926.

Spitting blood

clears up reality

and dream alike

Ota Dokan (d.1486) was stabbed while taking a bath and spoke this poem:

Has I no known

that I was dead

already

I would have mourned

my loss of life

The mistreated married woman Oroku (d. 1690?) killed herself and left this poem”

And had my days been longer

still the darkness

would not leave this world--

along death’s path, among the hills

I shall behold the moon 

Two poems from the famous monk/poet Basho:

The dying priest

looks as if

he new it all

The last of human desire

he grasps at

the air

During his last moment, Zen master Shisui’s disciples requested that he write a death poem. He grasped his brush, painted a circle, cast the brush aside, and died. The circle— indicating the void, the essence of everything, enlightenment.

Let me end with one by the revered Daido Ichpi (d. 1370).

A tune on non-being

Filling the void

Spring sun

Snow whiteness

Bright clouds

Clear winds

Allow me to add my own little poem about death:

A Little Ditty On Death

(technically, I wrote this while still mostly having both feet in this world, but then often one never really knows, it might end up a death poem, makes me a bit cautious about finishing it).

Death is all around now

(what we call death)

Taking one best friend after another

Grand mothers and still-born sons

Celebrities and nobodies

Whatshisname at the hardware store

Who knew where everything was

But some really important people too

The President of Venezuela and

Jean at church we all called a saint

And that slow waitress at Skippers cafe, Anne

Who was really nice just the same

(no one even guessed she was sick!)

Chicago bluesman Magic Slim died

And Judy Kozak the first playboy bunny

Lots of other good people too

Going then gone

I’m sick to death of it

(what we call death)

**** Third Station Of The Cross:  Jesus Falls For The First Time

I haven’t finished my poem for the third station of the cross yet (I am way behind in my commitments) so let me offer this about meaning and prayer that I wrote a while back when my wife and I had some time before dinner on our anniversary Feb.14th.  Since the restaurant was nearby we decided to kill some time by stopping by the chapel at Providence hospital in Everett.  We wanted to visit the chapel and re-read the prayers that our family have written into the prayer request book over the years.  However, our prayers were missing and in their place was a new prayer book that only went back a few months.  The Catholic chaplain that I have come to know pretty well over the years popped by and told me that they go through one or two books a year these days so together we went off searching for the old filled up prayer books.  After a lot of rummaging around we found all the previous prayer books going all the way back to 1936.  Over 70 years of prayers all stacked up on shelves in a dank storage room.  In those prayer books there is so much desperate sorrow, shameless pleading, even some anger and hatred, and a lot of tear stained pages.  But there is also some joy and thankfulness and a lot of honesty and insight not found often enough in our ordinary lives.

It took awhile but the priest found the book from when my wife had open heart surgery 3 years ago and in it were all the prayers of the children and grandchildren and many friends and all of my own prayers too, answered prayers too as grace would have it.   He left me to keep researching by myself and it took awhile but I found the old prayer book form 1982 when one of my daughters had suffered a terrible head injury after falling from our moving car.  I had forgotten but over the next few weeks in the hospital I had written about a dozen prayers.

Head injuries are perplexing and hard to diagnose, and for the first few hours after the accident it seemed that my daughter was alright so she was sent home from the doctors office with bruises and with bandaids on scratches.  But then about an hour or so later her eyesight in one eye began to fail then her right arm went numb, then she couldn’t walk or even stand up, then a more profound paralysis set in, then it got much worse.  Let me say, It’s much harder to go from bad news to good news, and then back to bad news, to even worse news; to go from hearing that “your daughter seems to be fine so just take her home” (thank you, thank you Jesus!) to, “we’re sorry, your daughter is bleeding in her brain and we just can’t stop it ”(No! God No!). 

Turns out I am really not a very good prayer after all, I never have been.  Most of my prayers were kinda like this one:  “Dear Jesus please heal my daughter, please let her live, please let her walk again, don’t let her die, thank you, I’m sorry.” You know, that sort of thing.  Really quite simple, ordinary, unsophisticated, like so many of the other prayers written in these prayer books and prayed each moment everywhere in the world.  And although I didn’t remember any of my actual prayers, I had never forgotten the fear and the pain.  I am almost sure though that God remembers all of our prayers.  But if not, I have copies of my prayers on file now.  And on the last day when God is finished examining my life and deeds, my words and works, then I can open up my own book and God can watch those prayers fly from the pages again like furious spirits unbound.

Obliged.

Life size sculpture with my death mask