by Peter Marin
Another Christmas, another New Year… How quickly they succeed one another now, with the spaces between, though deepening, somehow always shorter!
I am reluctant to write another message, want to cling, somehow, to silence, and yet there are frayed connections out there to friends I want to keep alive and intact, if only though these brief, sporadic, annual messages.
At my age, each year diminishes the numbers of surviving friends, and others seem further away, confronting their own problems and issues, and time and age and death become powers to be factored into the living equation of each life, and so connections — these hand-holds, life-lines, skeins and tangles of light — seem more important than ever.
And I think, too, that age, or let us call it “late-stage life,” despite all of the interest in it and books about it, has yet to be fully understood or successfully described from inside. In terms of its odd and unexpected gifts (beside the losses), its progressions of experience, the origami changes and folds in time itself, its expansiveness and openings and the strange spaciousness in which interior immediacy becomes something other than it was before — ah, if only more men and women spoke from within it, describing it as experience!
Astonishing, the morphing of memories and waves of sensitivities that occur as changes and crises appear and pass, death comes close and draws away, the past, re-inspected, offers new revelations, the future, fore-shortened, changes the shape of each moment, and each moment, as it deepens and opens, becomes, or can become, the occasion for gratitude and praise…
Beyond that?
For some reason, these past few weeks I have been thinking again about the French notion of liberty, fraternity (though now, of course, we’d say solidarity) and equality, and I think I understand in a new way (a reflection of my age?) that these can be taken not just as political values, but also as a partial guide to how to conduct our lives.
I remain continually moved, still, when I see these elements in action, when I see people reaching across the imposed limits of class and gender and color to actually be with others, to stand with them against power and authority, or simply meet them face to face as comrades and equals.
Too many of us, I fear, have been schooled in a kind of noblesse oblige that becomes, in practice, noblesse obliteration: a way of even doing good that at the same time humiliates, subjugates, objectifies and insults those whose destinies we claim to want to improve.
This is, in part, what the phrase “class consciousness” means: the abyss between us and others, the limits to our empathy and care and the moral forgetfulness engendered by how, without thinking, we think.
Of course, I must quickly add that I know most of us, most of the time, probably do the best we can as time and circumstance and our own energies and lights and obligations (oh, so many!) permit. And yet, always, thank heavens, there are those who, as can we, do even better than most of us (and I include myself here) presently do.
So once again, as always, I want to thank those of you who struggle against the grain to bring value into the world as a living thing. That is, for me, along with the generosity of spirit and care we owe to those we love, and the stubborn and difficult telling of truth and, yes, the making of art, at least some of the time, foremost among the several ways we can, individually and together, keep alive the possibility of a just and decent future.
May the new year bring to us all what we truly need!
Also, for those who want to bother, please find a few imperfect gifts, below: elegies, praise, poems.
CHRISTMAS DAY
by Peter Marin
In their long coats, laceless boots.
smelling of whiskey, of death, they
stand on corners or sit curbside
or lie on the grass of the park —
these angels, winged minions, sent
to remind us of conscience.
Ask them their names, they say
Sorrow, Pestilence, Hunger.
War and Regret, hands
dirty and worn in ragged gloves
testing our patience, our love.
Who can see them, these truths,
staring us in the face, demanding
we become better than we are?
Who turns away? Who will bring God
back into the world, born again,
this day, Christmas day?
SPACES
by Peter Marin
Older,
in the spaces
between leaves, cells, notes and words
I can find a home where
nothing is. Or was
in forward spiraling time
at the edges of meanings, membranes,
too many dimensions to be named.
Everything slides into place,
out of sight. Waves. Particles. Strings
not angels on the head
of a dropped pin making
the sound of one clapping hand.
What a ride! Lost in the mysteries
beyond knowing, the antinomies
drifting by, the Forms not yet
in view. The singing of
angels/ to thy/ rest
is silence, wouldn’t you
know it, on the old corner
in Brooklyn, before, then after,
where, even now, I am and am not
as death, as it will, comes to meet me.
AGAIN
by Peter Marin
Beckoning
in the last silence
Lear is dancing on the heath
with Cordelia, Gloucester and the Fool
as if death did not exist.
Nothing has changed
into the plenitude of Becoming
without end. Waves of light
pass through the flesh
from suns too distant to be named.
We are energies enclosed by a skin
thickened inside into the mystery
of awareness, barely aware
of what we might be. On
the porch, sipping stale
coffee, I see the dead
come alive in the wood, fade
into the brightness between trees,
then emerge in silence and thought.
Invisible membranes tremble.
The air vibrates with aliveness.
Borne on wild currents of air
angels like surfers balance or fall
into teeming Leviathan seas.
All is a singing of praise,
a gift on this Christmas morning.
TIPS
by Peter Marin
The tips
of my fingers
glow in the dark with the light
of the moon. Watch: my
spread arms become wings
in the waves of becoming
crossing what remains
of the night. Am I
ready? O yes: for the long
journey, the bridge of sighs
between life and death.
The last breath is the first
hint of the stillness
to come. Is it rest? Or forever?
We will die before knowing
or know after death — no
more can be said before going.
BALANCED
by Peter Marin
Balanced
on currents of light
like surfers on their waves —
here we are. The moments
unfold going back
to beginnings, forward
to the brightening end. Astonishing,
is it not: the complexities
becoming simple in
the immensities of thought?
Antinomies, said Kant, as the mind
drifts off the charts, into
the distances beyond. Plato
was right, something appears:
unexpected, unnamed, the visible
light of the Forms, though
still hidden. How close
the world is, fading away!
The dead gather, speak
in soft voices, affirming
who we are. In streets, on freights,
with comrades, there I was
at home, always in exile, one
place to another, seeking. Now
it is thought, the river of life,
carries me onward. The heart,
like an ark on a flood, comes
to shore, releasing its cargo —
whatever, whoever, I loved.
Birds fill the sky, beasts the forest —
a peaceable kingdom, found in the
mind, vivid, alive. Eden, again! I
ride the slow flow of the blood
home to where it began.
FOR FRED, DYING
by Peter Marin
We were lucky, you and I,
on those mornings in Mexico
at the edges of the sea
in the arms of the women
who welcomed us back into Eden.
Let us celebrate, growing old,
the laden ark of the heart
as it out-rides the storm
filled with the pleasures of life.
Let us remember the slide of bare feet
over the coolness of the tiles
and the salt-scent of bodies
pressed against us at dawn.
What a world, then, was ours,
in its plenitude of delights,
in the opening of its gates,
in the comrades who made us at home.
And can it be otherwise, ahead?
Through the avenue of the trees
you can see the Sea of Un-knowing;
dozing, you dream in its arms;
the soft sound of its waves
is like the whisper of angels —
o yes, they are saying your name.
FOR FRED AGAIN
by Peter Marin
This rising of brightness
coming to meet us, this proximity,
this approach, this strange
nearness in withdrawal
as, passing over, the arc
of becoming becomes a crown:
the blue sky, the green and gold
of the trees,
the flames of existence
burning themselves into
the sweetness, the finality, of age…
Gratitude overflows the heart
to become the River of Life
on whose banks we celebrate.
Our glasses are raised in
the fabled Garden of the Gods
where death vanishes forever.
L’chaim, we say. To life. To life!
How lucky we are to be here, together.