Her name is Eilidh

Her name is Eilidh

Her name means Radiant OneEilidh
Bright and brilliant and exuberant
Blazing orb at the center
Of her own universe
Our bodies and hearts bound
                        in her orbit.

Her name could mean Eccentric One
Odd and abstruse and outlandish
Baffling behaviors defying explanation
Compulsive routines taxing toleration
Our bodies and hearts bewildered
                       by her id.

Her name should mean Indefatigable One
Tireless and tenacious and temerarious
Jumping in with all four feet
Sprinting, bounding, leaping, flying
Our bodies and hearts drained
                       by her zeal.

Her name means Radiant One
Bodacious and beautiful and beguiling
Commanding our complete attention
Even is spite of ourselves
Our bodies and hearts utterly ensnared
                       by her charms.

Her name is Eilidh

Oystercatcher on Iona

Oystercatcher on Iona

Ungainly and unperturbed
Amidst croppings of fuchsia heather
Solitarily standing on spindly salmon legs
Sprouting from a squat white breast
Improbable orange beak
Highlighted against the cobalt sea
Unblinking claret eye
Nearly invisible against its coal black head
Preternaturally perched atop an elongated neck

The isle is yours as well as mine
Each of us blessed and a blessing
An I mo chridhe, I mo ghraidh

Oystercatcher

The life and times of Umberto Cannelini

The life and times of Umberto Cannelini

I have been asked to tell you my story, to share with you the particulars of the kind of life I live, myself and those of my ilk. If you have any passing interest or even mild curiosity, I invite you to listen. Otherwise, well, I will completely understand.

You will not envy me. First, there is the fact of my name — Umberto. It is neither strong nor beautiful. It does not roll easily off the tongue or inspire awe, but catches in the throat and lands like a splat on the ears. It’s as if someone hadn’t an idea in the world what to call me — um, um — and then was convulsed by a sudden sharp cough — berto. But it is the name I have and I will have no other, so I simply have to live with it. I do understand that the meaning of my name is “famous,” but that merely adds a cruel irony on top of the disphony of my name, because I have no claim to any sort of celebrity or even notoriety.

Because, you see, I am a bean, a humble white kidney bean, Phaseolus Vulgaris. There you have me: humble, ordinary, vulgar.

My life is short, my existence constrained. I do not travel. I see nothing and know nothing of the wider world. All I know is the inside of the green pod that I share with a half dozen or so of my brothers and sisters. And my destiny? Our destiny? Our reason for being? To be eaten. We are torn from our home just as we have reached maturity, thrown into boiling water and eaten, or stuffed and sealed in a tin can later to be eaten, or set out to succumb to a slow desiccation so we may we rehydrated weeks or months or years after and be eaten.

What kind of life is that, to serve no purpose other than the benefit of another, to be nurtured only to be sacrificed, to be denied any and all greater glory?

I will tell you what kind of life that is. I have said already that you will not envy me and, doubtless, you will not. But maybe you should. My life is not about glory, but about service, not about aggrandizing my own treasures, but about putting the richness of my substance to good use, fulfilling the need of beings with whom I share this planet.

And though my life is short, while I live it is a wonder. My mother is the earth and my father the sky, and the Maker of all that is that sees me, sees me and calls me good. Is there any better reward than to be called good, to know that your unique beauty is unmatched, to be useful, appreciated, valued?

If you have listened until the end of my story, I pray that you will not envy me, but that the particular glory of your being, your humble purpose granted you for the sake of an other, your real goodness won not by achievement but vouchsafed as gift will be revealed to you, and that you too will have a story to tell.

If I Were Gazan

If I Were Gazan

If I were Gazan
I would pray for sleep
sweet unconsciousness
for dreamless sleep
unhaunted by grey ash or orange fire or crimson blood.

If I were Gazan
I would cleave to memory
consoling souvenir
sunlight dancing on my wife’s face
dappling the beguiling smile now forever erased.

If I were Gazan
I would scream at God
dumbfounded rage
badgering the pitiless One
unmoved unmoving while his children are returned to dust.

If I were Gazan
I would rue my grandchildren
cruel blessing
their unbearable tomorrows
untempered by any yesterdays in which to find fleeting succor.

If I were Gazan
I would pray to never sleep
desperate vigilance
my only remaining duty
to help them survive — to breath, to touch, to be touched — one more day.

If I were Gazan —
but I am not Gazan and you are
unthinkable injustice
that the same sun and the same God
shine warm and bright on me and burn you with searing flame.

Somnambulant

Somnambulant

Somnambulant rocket ships
Poured down my throat
Stick like pins
Before bursting into unquenchable flame.

Somnambulant butterflies
Twitter on Elon Musk’s nose
Restoring order to this
Fractious folly.

Somnambulant terrapins
Strictly following orders
Fastidiously dying
One by one by one.

Somnambulant oboists
Iridescent against the crimson sky
Bursting boundaries
Like bouncing billiard balls.

Somnambulant mysterium
Creeping along the edges
Flooding the universe
With ineffable grace.

Somnambulant rocket ships
Twitter on Elon Musk’s nose
Fastidiously dying
Like bouncing billiard balls.

Somnambulant butterflies
Strictly following orders
Bursting boundaries
With ineffable grace.

Somnambulant terrapins
Iridescent against the crimson sky
Flooding the universe
Before bursting into unquenchable flame.

Somnambulant oboists
Creeping along the edges
Stick like pins
Fractious folly.

Somnambulant mysterium
Poured down my throat
Restoring order to this
One by one by one.

Partly Cloudy

Partly Cloudy

The forecast is partly cloudy. Must be the weather-maker can’t make up her mind. Or perhaps it is we who are confused, unable to understand a thing as it is, but only as what it is not, not wholly sunny, not wholly cloudy.

But why must a bluebird day be cloudless? Why can’t a cerulean sky decorated here and there and there with cotton ball clouds be considered perfect in itself, whole in itself, not part this or part that?

August 17 was such a day, a playful breeze rustling skirts and tussling hair as we gathered on the roof of the Harmac in downtown Cedar Rapids, a perfect day, a perfect day for a wedding, bright sun warming our foreheads and sparkling on shirts and dresses and ties, blue and red, yellow and purple, a kaleidoscope of bright colors worn per the bride’s request, all of us sharing her joy, all of us sharing their joy, as huge puffy clouds drifted overhead.

As he said, “I give myself to you to be your husband,” and as she said, “I give myself to you to be your wife,” the day, wind and sun and cloud, gave itself to us, not in part, but in whole, imprinting that time-stilling moment indelibly, not only on our minds and on our hearts, but on our skin, too.

There is little in this world that is all this or all that, but much in this world that is beautiful, beautiful as it is, at any given moment and in any given place an amalgam of this and that, of feeling and color, of sense and mystery, of change and stillness, of sun and cloud.

“Now, to what can I compare the people of this day?,” Jesus said. “They are like children sitting in the marketplace. One group shouts to the other, ‘We played wedding music for you, but you wouldn’t dance! We sang funeral songs, but you wouldn’t cry!’” But you, perhaps neither dancing nor crying, are as you are, and that is whole, that is good, that is perfect, and that is what we must see and love.

April

April

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

I was born in the cruellest month, this month of dead land, in Maine a time of in-between, of not still and not yet, not still winter but not yet spring, mud season, colorless season unless you count the dull brown of lawn and roadside or the dull grey of bare trunks and branches. I might wish to have been born in July, like my wife, revelling in the brilliant light dancing among the yellows and purples and reds of the lilies, or in October, like my grandson, tramping up a rock-strewn trail among oak and birch and maple exulting in their autumnal dress.

But I was born in the cruellest month, this month mixing memory and desire, each birthday cataloging an ever increasing number of days and months and years irretrievable immutable shaping me but also binding me a looming thatness out of which or against which I now must make myself wanting yearning praying to be free to be able to live in and for and by what is beautiful.

I was born in the cruellest month, this month stirring dull roots with spring rain, asking old limbs to dance and a jaded spirit to soar, teasingly intimating that adventure and revelation and joy are just over the horizon …

Or perhaps they are …

Perhaps April is not the cruellest month, but a month for hope undimmed and unvanquished, undeterred by bleak days and starless nights, unfazed by any accumulation of burdensome remembrance, unfettered by any limitations laid on spirit or body by time or space.

April is the bravest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, infusing
Memory with desire, stirring
Dull roots to new life with spring rain.

The watcher

The watcher

Our writers’ group assignment today … We each took a book and found the fifth word on the forty-seventh page of the book. We wrote down each of these words, eleven words in all. Then we wrote pieces that had no requirements other than they must contain these eleven words. The words: the, the, Scioto (a river), was, his, fisherman, impressive, hill, livings, front, edge. Here is my piece …

He stood on the knobby edge of the granite escarpment, gnarly limbs of stunted spruces dotting the steep rise of the familiar hill behind him, far from the first time he had stood here, just here as he stood now, wordless and transfixed, his eyes following the tumultuous freshet twisting and turning beneath his feet, its waters shrouded in morning mist, heedlessly bent on its one purpose: to spill itself into the sea.

The name of the stream, if you must know, was the Scioto, but the name meant little to him, merely an epithet rather arbitrarily attached by men who hardly knew the river, who could hardly know a river that lived and moved and had its being centuries before they had theirs. They borrowed the word from the Wyandots, another affront, naming a river not theirs with a word not theirs, stealing from the peoples who had made their livings for generations from these fertile waters.

He hardly knew the river, though undoubtedly better than most, the best moments of his now long life spent here watching its moods, spring and summer, fall and winter, walking its stony banks, wading its stiff currents, trailing fingers in the frigid waters. He always came here alone, in the commonly understood sense of the word, though he knew with absolute certainty, that in this hallowed place he was never alone. Given the constraints of his delimited body and his oh so brief lifespan, he was sure the river knew him better than he knew it.

He watched now as a lone fisherman stepped in front of a mid-stream boulder, carefully moving in the direction of a smooth run along near bank. Pausing in the eddy, the stranger raised his rod tip and, after two or three false casts, set the fly at the end of his leader gently into the seam between run and eddy. His steady retrieve was abruptly interrupted, rod now bent, line spooling off his reel, and then the head-shaking leap of an consummately impressive rainbow trout.

The fisherman took back line, steadily and surely bringing the fish to net. After admiring the exquisite silver and pink flanks of this inimitable creature, he held the fish beneath the babbling surface for the stream for a few short moments before releasing it to its proper home, which he, not the fisherman, but the one watching the fisherman from the granite escarpment, which he hoped too was his own proper home, because when the fisherman lifted his eyes from the waters looking upwards to where he himself stood, he realized that watched and watcher were the same.