THE PROSE VERSION OF THE POEM
Innocence renewed
I tried to spare the details, to avoid too much information about those unpleasant bodily functions and fluids generally not described in polite company. But genteel avoidance proved too obscure. Almost certainly as the result of anniversary grief, stress, and exertion, a volume of blood, clotted and liquid, began to manifest in my urine in June, perfectly timed with the date of Lee's death. It was not the first time. Previous Junes had seen similar occurrences and all medical tests proved nothing. The mind is a powerful thing. I resisted returning to the doctor, but my friends would not have it. “Go to the doctor,” they demanded, reciting their own experiences of kidney failures and such.
The blood persisted for three days, five days, a week, and on. There was no pain, only the dread of watching the blood and clots emerge consistently in terrifying spurts. Blood would leak out in the night, during sleep.
For two weeks, all sexual desire was extinguished, evaporated. I didn't even want to risk excitement. At the same time, as I walked through the quotidian routines of spring (also attributing the blood to annual allergies of the season), I found myself lifted into a sense of peacefulness. My own death was constantly a thought and possibility and, more, an inevitability to be accepted without complaint.
I felt at peace, strangely. And I almost remembered what life was like in days of innocence. The world was new again, different. And I attributed my ability to see the world like this, at least in part, to the fact that I had been faithful, on and off, in my particular, specific practice of transcendental meditation for almost fifty – count 'em, fifty – years.
After two weeks, the bleeding stopped. I'm going back to the doctor, reluctantly, for another test next week. I feel fine and never really stopped feeling fine. I dreamed last night about Lee. We had a baby daughter who started taking in complete sentences as I carried her. Lee knew of her ability like this and had failed to tell me. We fought. I woke up.
The poem I wrote concluded with my predictable and not exactly explainable philosophy of eternity and eternal life. At this very minute, I'm flying from Oakland to Chicago, writing on my phone with one finger, listening with headphones to showtunes, including Bette Midler in Hello, Dolly, and Lauren Ambrose in My Fair Lady, my head bobbing no doubt to the consternation of the guy in the middle seat.
And there you have it. The annotated poem. Probably nothing what you imagined, but in my other philosophy of life, whatever you imagined the poem was about is equally valid and maybe even more so. Words just have lives of their own. We don't control them.
THE POEM
Those two weeks when innocence stood at the door
Hauling an urgent, primal, necessary spurt of blood
Everything holy and flushed away
Mortality came greeting at the dawn, doling itself out in flesh reminders
Wounds spilling yet free of pain
Breathing glorious
With air visible and sweet
A clownfish aware of water for the first time
A child again, returning after 60 years of small steps into wilderness
After 50 years of meditation like the gray bearded man on the crag
Or the seeker trekking up to sputter a worn query on the meaning
Of everything, although, thighs and ankles aching
He had picked it up along the way
He already knew before opening his mouth
The bluebird’s eggs were in the basket all along all the time
Because of all those years sitting still morning and night
The guru of intention and will came through
Precisely as promised
And so here we are all three all one and nobody home
This is what it means to be saved
Since the afterlife left yesterday
Tiptoeing out in the dark
June 30-July 2, 2019
