Blessings

 

Indian Pipe
or
Ghost Plant

s. lee photo

Blessings

That was as much hope that the purest

and saddest were prepared to allow for. 

                                                          Seamus Heaney

                                                          An Aisling in the Burren

 

I won’t go to hell today, I need to

leave Dante and his guide climbing

 

and ducking the demons that fly beside

the trenches of the thieves and fires

 

that light them to ash and then once

ash make them people

 

again and then again burn into ash

again and again and as many agains

 

as eternity can spin.  I think he’ll forgive

me for lingering, won’t he, my slow

 

blind climb a grope through the air

of  a throne stone – what was that quote?   

 

we're all, every one of us, on a collision 

course for into every stone we've thrown?

 

Today, I won’t chance ten miles through

woods and edges of small ponds

 

of both standing and dam-manipulated

water.  The lake, raised and raised

 

because of this season’s rain (-it’s

a man made lake, maybe 75 years

 

old-) has pulled back or has been drained

less aggressively than it was amassed

 

but still, she seems sent into her own old

self, or some assemblage

 

to her old self.  The abundant fungus,

copulating without most of us

 

knowing, thrusts up through, a spongy

sun of an orb, humble and just, or well

 

simply a mushroom.  Label it what you like

or have read.  Today, while Dante and Virgil

 

climb toward Ulysses and away from the circle

of those particular thieves, I’ll walk parallel through

 

my own ghosts and maybe shake hands

with them or in the very least lean in

 

briefly to tell them that yesterday I thought

the Indian Pipe was especially

 

vibrant, and the doe and her lamb who

watched me and then walked off

 

were the culminating blessing of the

hours, and too the child who was

 

crying on the bike path as I passed by

waved to me through his own particular

 

misery, his backpack spilling crackers,

the simple grade two math work-

 

book open and absent of solutions,

and a tangle

 

of dinosaurs on a bundle of ropes,

like it was a chew toy and somewhere,

 

hopefully, though I saw no sign

of it, a dog nosing the beaver pond,

 

the doe and her baby long gone,

his nose in their hoofprints,

 

and the boy’s callbox gone raw and soft

from hollering the long long way

across the road to home.