230308 knocking urgent and knocking still

Mar. 8

He is old. His ears are scarred from long infections and are prone to more irritation. His neck is stiff and on Monday he sprained his left front shoulder. He lies in the sun at my feet while I smoke a cigarette on the porch.

I wonder if the maple misses its brother, taken down last year, too old and broken to survive in the city, where it might fall on the house. In the spring the leaves will come out, burgundy. The old tree leafed pale green, like a fair-haired adopted sibling, and dropped handfuls of yellow blossoms all over the lawn.

No more.

We all are old now.

China grumbles war, Russia shakes an invasion over its neighbour, breaking the lives, the buildings and bridges. Homeless join the homeless - refugees of all the wars and hatred in the world.

I look at the Prime Minsiter's face in the paper and wonder what he thinks about in the darkness in bed. Does he see some good that he might do if he dared, if he cared enough to call down the rich, call down the corrupt and give the country to the people? Do all the old, the leaders of the world, think that change is not possible now, that the doors are permanently closed. Democracies are crumbling with the mould of selfishness and self-righteous hatred. We are old and watch it fall, helpless in our infirmity. We are departing and now we see what once we were blithely ignorant of, what our greed and false beliefs were doing to the world.

The oceans are dying, poison is seeping into the clear rivers that water the land where today's future would blossom. Ah, the train has stopped and we are stranded, without power, without hope.

I wonder if the old people in the First War felt the pain of leaving their children without a life or hope. I wonder if, in the dustbowls of the depression, the old and broken were crying for the children and grandchildren they were leaving behind in the dust. I wonder about the grandmothers in the Second Great War. They too must have thought the world was ending and grieved that they would not be there to protect and feed their children's children.

Where is god in all of this? He is out spinning galaxies, worlds and worlds turning blind and asleep. He is gravity and light, burning and entropy, birthing suns and breaking out moons to circle the cooling planets. It is all entropy but then spring comes and tiny plants push green into the light. Buds foretell fruit.

At my age I finally face the breaking mortality that is the fact of the aged. There are wounds now that will not heal, bones that will not be whole again.

The anger is a cancer that eats the hearts of the hopeful, the ones who wish there was peace and life for tomorrow. Anger, impotent and stale and useless, turns inwards because there is nowhere to send it that it will not fall on fallow ground, deaf ears. It is too late for us to lift it up.

But the tree does not think or weep or regret. The dog does not think of yesterday or tomorrow but sits in the sun and feels - what? The warmth on his fur, my presence, his tummy happy and his shoulder sore. It is what it is.

That's the trouble. We think and worry, and know the past and fear the future. Is it possible that the sunshine is enough, the joy today? It is so small, and so circumscribed with pain, only because we know.

How is it that we walk forward, and go to bed each night, wake each morning and do what needs to be done to live this small life? That, that too, is the universe turning and turning, each day, each sunrise, until the sun burns out, until the death is turned inside-out, magic reversal into new light, out of the fire a phoenix, alive and winged. And we plod forward. Ah, the tortures of metaphor and poetry that are all we have.

Or does a magic, a god reside there?

I feel as if I should break apart, that my breast should cleave open and light flash out fierce - too loud, too broken to endure. Atom split so that the energy will flare. What strength is ours to walk and walk, with such a diamond in our souls that will not break though we vibrate with a force that should surely crush its tiny self? It is only the small power cell after all, the heart beating and beating until it does not beat, the waking and the going to bed, the handful of yellow flowers and the dead leaves blowing across the frosted meadow.

I philosophize because I cannot stop myself. We paint or write or sing because we do. Crying only helps for a while. I guess that I am the stone that gets slowly smaller, with the blowing of the wind, and the moss. There it goes again, damn poetry! Why cannot I not lose myself in the crying and be done? - the stone's blown dust, to be soaked by the next rain into the soil, under the flower that is blooming again.