Fling

This playing around with words
       is a reckless fling,
A lustful binge
        and a compulsive urge;




This is my midlife crisis on the verge
Of discovery,
        the soul’s rebalancing;

This is my return to youth, remembering
Whatever whirling memories regurge
Out of the pool,
        however they emerge;

This is my search for truth, if anything
Is true, if a ring of truth can ever rise
Out of the fog
        of this pretentious surge;

These are my alibis when truths diverge
And leave me looking
        foolish in your eyes;

This is my fleeting chance to apologize
For being otherwise
        with a reckless fling.


from Calendrums

Palm Sunday Anniversary, 2014

March 19.  I did not choose this date,
but today has some significance to me,
because it was 25 year ago today 

that my father died.  And maybe
I shouldn’t dwell on this, but
He was 51, the same age I am today.  

And he died of a heart attack, which 
apparently runs in the family:
all six of my dad’s brothers and sisters

have had heart conditions since then, 
So here I am in the middle of Lent,
focusing on my mortality.

As we are supposed to do, I guess,
but what I really want to talk about 
is the rest of the story.  


March 19, 1989 was Palm Sunday. Lent 
came early that year, and it was (imagine!) 
a beautiful beginning-of-spring day.

The grass was turning green.  The sky was blue.
And I was going to get out and enjoy the day.
But then the phone rang, and it changed everything.

My thoughts ran all over the place: Immediately, 
I missed my dad.  But then I remembered 
that I hadn’t talked to him in over a month.

I thought about how 26 was way too young 
to be making funeral arrangements.  And I thought
about the 600 mile drive I had in front of me.

But that call had come just as I was about to go 
to church that morning, and something compelled me
to keep on going.  And it was a good thing.


Because for all of my scattered thoughts, I needed
to hear and sing those processional hymns,
and even though there were tears in my eyes,

it was good to be part of a crowd raising their 
palm fronds and turning their eyes to Jesus
and maybe it was going to be a tough week ahead, 

but it was nice to be reminded that Easter was coming.
And the reminders kept coming, all week long.
Everyone was so warm and close that week,

friends, family but also members of my dad’s church,
people I didn’t even know, and they were smiling, 
even laughing, as they took time to remember Joe Vold, 

and when we got to the funeral, there was even 
a sense of celebration, because my dad knew 
where he was going, and he wanted us to know it, too.


By Friday, I was back home in Chicago, 
and Friday night I found myself back in church.  
This time it was the Good Friday service:  

the Tennebrae service, where they shroud the cross 
and dim the lights and everyone slowly filters 
out of the church, quietly, somberly, 

and where the name of the day practically begs 
the question: what’s so good about it?  
But we all know the answer, don’t we?

And that’s the rest of the story.
You know, I might just live another 51 years,
and I have some encouragement in that:

of my dad’s six brothers and sisters, 
five of them are still going strong, 
and they’re all getting well into their eighties now.


But more importantly, I’m encouraged by
the daily reminders all around me, 
encouragements from my aunts and uncles 

and many of you, too, reminding me daily
that regardless of where we are in life
or how tough our Lenten journey may seem

it is good to know where we are going.


from Stillwater Symposia

Palm Sunday, 2009

This will be the twentieth Palm
Sunday after my father died
(All the importance we put in a day).
“Sunday’s coming,” he used to say
In the evenings, preparing to preach.

He was fifty one; another month
He would have been fifty two.
We plodded through that Holy Week;
By Maundy Thursday we were driving home;
Good Friday, watched them veil the cross;

And Saturday, turned the television on
To see March Madness with brother Josh
Blowing a horn with the Illini band.
“Sunday’s coming,” Dad used to say,
As if every day were Saturday.

Another two months and brother Dan
Would graduate from college,
Dad’s college, his old alma mater
From thirty years before.  It felt to us
Like Dad was there all over again.

And suddenly it’s twenty years ago,
Twenty years of Sundays coming.
As Dad would say, I’m doing okay.
But it will be harder at number twenty five
When I will be fifty one.

from Calendrums

Characters

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land 
(TWL), Section 1





          The Burial Of The Dead

                    See The Order for the Burial of the Dead in The Church of England, 
                    The Book of Common Prayer (1662). The order of service begins with 
                    a passage from John 11:26 (King James Version, 1611), and 
                    specifically from the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead: 

                    ...whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.

                    The poem, meanwhile, proceeds with a series of character introductions,
                    beginning with Countess Marie and followed by the Son of Man, the 
                    Hyacinth Prince, the Clairvoyante and, obtusely, the Reader’s Brother. 
                    The characters generally seem eager to live, to speak and be heard, but 
                    death lingers around them.  

                    This is sometimes called the “earth” section, the first of the poem’s five 
                    sections using the CLASSICAL ELEMENTS of earth, air, fire, water and 
                    wind as themes. Eliot would later repeat this structure with the first four 
                    elements and the quintessential wind in Four Quartets (1943). 

                    Designation of the classical elements can be found in early Babylonian, 
                    Indian, Greek and Chinese philosophies. See Anon., Enuma Elis (ca. 
                    1800 BC, tr. as The Seven Tablets of Creation by E. A. Wallis Budge, 
                    1921), a Babylonian cuneiform text which describes creation through 
                    personifications of water, earth, sky and fire. See also Upanishads, 
                    Shvetashvatara Upanishad 2:12 (ca 400-200 BC, tr. Robert Ernest 
                    Hume, 1921): 

                    When the fivefold quality of Yoga has been produced,
                    Arising from earth, water, fire, air and space,
                    No sickness, no old age, no death has he
                    Who has obtained a body made out of the fire of Yoga.

                    See also Plato, Timaeus 48b, (ca. 360 BC, tr. W.R.M. Lamb, 1925): 

                    We must gain a view of the real nature of fire and water, air and earth, 
                    as it was before the birth of Heaven.

                    Finally, see Anon., Mawangdui Silk Texts (ca. 168 BC), presenting the 
                    Chinese philosophy of Wu Xing and the five phases of wood, fire, earth, 
                    metal and water.


from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)

Elements

Fire, wind, ground and water: we
have thrived on these, would hold and harness these.

Science, passion, faith, philosophy:
we turn to these and would depend on these

to understand small sparks, short gusts, the mist
and dust of east and west, of north and south;

we cling, we clutch and to the death defend
the corners of existence of and in

a universe we cannot comprehend,
nor are these elements we can control,

the warmth, the breath, the earth, the very blood,
of fire and wind, of ground and water: we,

for all we grasp, remain beholden to
the God of time and space and land and sea.


from Turning the Metaphor

Eulogies

I

Your words to my lips to their hearts:
What you speak from your soul
I would seek to, strive to understand
That they, your audience, would feel
More than hear what I say,
That I, your agent, would sing
More than simply recite,
That you, my brother, would be in spirit here
To touch their hearts directly
And make some subtle difference
To the beat of their lives
In the slow, sometimes painful dance of time,
That we could render this poem complete:
Your soul to my song to their beat.



 








II

She lives in your warm smile

     and your easy laugh,

     your purposeful hugs;

She lives in the way you keep house

     and home and family together,

     in the part of you too that would see the world;

She is in your eyes and all they have seen,

     in your hands resting gently on tired shoulders,

     in your heart of tender steel;

She drives with you through Minnesota,

     away from the cities and farms

     to where the trees turn birch

     and the lakes become personal;

She stands with you at the front door,

     welcoming, and again

     with your smile your laugh your hugs;

She will be forever the reason

     you are cousin, sister, brother,

     the ones to call her grandma,

     the man who named her Bunny;

She will linger

     in your lefse heritage, your Norwegian souls,

     in the percolating aromas of morning coffee

     in the happy of happy hour;

She will resonate

     in your day to day testimony,

     your quiet evening prayer,

     the hymn you hum.

Once she was the one

     who worked the lathe

     and weaved rugs

     and moved heavy stones to a beachfront dock;

It was not long ago

     she paddled a canoe

     and cleaned the fish we caught;

     not so long ago we drove to Idaho

And she worked crossword puzzles

     and knitted sweaters

     and baked pies and cookies

She would gently massage the knots out of your neck

     without you ever asking

     and one day she hugged you 
           from the back of your chair

     and said I am so happy you are here.

Now you hike through the woods

     and walk a beast of a dog;

     you find your lifelong companion

     and you keep planting trees

     and watching them grow;

And you travel the world

     and you never run out of places to go

     but you keep coming home

To sit on the deck, to watch

     the rising sun, the setting sun

     or in the house by the hearth

     you watch the fire

And you will hold this as long as you can,

     maybe you will glimpse heaven,

     or simply appreciate the moment

But you will smile

     and she will live on in your smile.


from Calendrums

Moleskin 2.4

My first memories, however, seem to immediately include my brother Daniel Martin. He was born where my sentience began: in central North Dakota during the war protest years, son of a homemaker and a seminarian, the second child as long as I’m here to remind him. Neither of us has any awareness of our family’s move to North Dakota, where our dad was assigned an internship in his last year of seminary, nor have we ever paused to consider what was surely, leading up to this, a momentous career change for our father. In our eyes he had always been a preacher, and we were the preacher’s kids. There is a lasting camaraderie in that distinction. There was also a level of community attention, and stigma, from this, which brotherhood would help us endure and appreciate.

Restatements

Those unable to speak their love

are as cold as hammered steel;

Those unable to grieve
are a vacant wind;

Those who are ungrateful

are frightened of themselves;

and those who cannot remember God

have grown older than the hills.

Say the name, O wild rose,

speak the unpronounceable;

Moisten your lips, move your tongue

and praise the indescribable;

Utter the words of every spring

waking the divine;

Open your mouth, O wild rose,

and reveal your hidden gold.

Sanai, ca. 1150AD, tr. Coleman Barks, 1993: 

   Those unable to grieve,

   or to speak of their love,

   or to be grateful, those

   who can't remember God

   as the source of everything,

   might be described as a vacant wind,

   or a cold anvil, or a group

   of frightened old people.

   Say the Name. Moisten your tongue

   with praise, and be the spring ground,

   waking. Let your mouth be given

   its gold-yellow stamen like the wild rose's.

Sanai, ca. 1150 AD, tr. Major J. Stephenson, Hadiqa, 1911:

To call on the name of friends, and the unhappy ones of this world, how thinkest thou of it? It is like calling on old women. Oppression, if He ordain it, is all justice; a life without thought of Him is all wind. He laughs who is brought to tears through Him; but that heart is an anvil that thinks not on Him. Thou art secure when thou pronouncest His name, –thou keepest a firm footing on thy path; make thou thy tongue moist, like earth, with remembrance of Him, that He may fill thy mouth, like the rose, with gold. – 

from Walled Gardens

Our (collective) Father (familiar)

     Our (collective) Father (familiar)

     who art in heaven, hallowed (praise)

     be thy name (Yahweh hear us calling).

     Thy kingdom come (show us your place),

     Thy will be done (the peace that passes)

     on earth (to mortals: Jesus born) 

     as it is in heaven (Jesus risen

     everlasting, every morning).

     Give us this day our daily bread 

     (the daily gift of life revealed)

     and forgive us our trespasses (faithless fears) 

     as we forgive (and learn to heal) 

     those who trespass (the uninvited)

     against us (us and them the same).

     Lead us (let us ever follow

     on thy path and in thy name)

     not into temptation (our otherwise

     of empty prayers and private hells),

     but deliver us (when we do not follow)

     from evil (save us from ourselves).

     For thine is the kingdom (heaven and earth) 

     and the power (every strength we know)

     and the glory (Jesus lives!), forever

     and ever. Amen (let it be so).


from March to December

We Need to Pray

It is a time of mixed emotions at 520 Stewart Ave. We are suddenly shaken with unfamiliar feelings of anxieties and perplexity, stunned by the news that brother Josh has a tumor in his head, and yet we are brought closer together by this. We are sharing our feelings and holding each other up and learning how to pray.

“The family that prays together stays together,” my girlfriend noted a few days ago, and it is true. We need the familiar so very much these days; we need to lean on and to be leaned upon; and when our mixed emotions threaten to weaken us and tear us apart, we need to pray.

We pray as Jesus taught us. It is not our instinctive nature to know how to pray or what to say, but Jesus has made it easy, giving us words that say it all, every word with a power that we cannot find on our own. We pray, right from the start, to one who has been personally introduced to us not only as the Lord’s father but as Our Father, in the spirit of togetherness and family. God is our father and this is our prayer.

We pray with a sense of our place and we praise God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name! But we also pray with the encouragement to turn boldly to Our Father with our every need. Jesus taught us to pray upward, without reserve and for everything at once: for strength and healing, providence and peace, hope and joy and humility. Yes, we talk of bread and leading and deliverance, but there is so much more than these words in the prayer we are taught. 

We pray for strength. We ask for the strength to merely stand sometimes, and once we are strong we pray for the strength to support others. And all along, weak or strong, we pray for the individual strengths of those around us. I am right now praying for Annie, our youngest sibling, who, being only twelve, has been hit especially hard this week. I am also praying for Mom and Don, who, being our parents, seem to be going through a period of rational denial —but who am I to say? I can only pray. And of course we all pray, every day, for Josh, who has the biggest battle to fight, and yet he seems so strong already, stronger than any one of us; often more fortified than all of us collectively. Still, we pray for his continued strength against all weakness, and we pray knowing that it is by the grace of God that Joshua is strong at all. All strength comes from God. Thine is the power.

We pray for healing. “Deliver us from evil.” There are people in our church family who have started praying fervently for Joshua’s physical healing. Maybe he will be healed by these petitions. For the sake of Joshua and all of us, I hope that this will be true. We love Josh, we don’t want to lose him, but we sometimes fear the worst —Joshua dying, leaving us — and so we pray desperately for God to take away the cause of this fear. Some people even say that it is Satan inside of Joshua’s head, and these people pray quite intensely to exorcize. But I must tell you, I haven’t prayed this prayer very often. I don’t know why God put a tumor in Josh’s brain or why there is fear inside of my own head, but I don’t want to think about Satan. Nonetheless, or maybe consequently, I pray: Deliver us from fear and deliver Joshua from every malignancy. Deliver us from doubt and every shade of the devils within us. Deliver us from evil.

We pray for providence. This is the healing prayer that I am more inclined to pray. I pray for the doctors. I pray for a reduction of any pain Joshua may have. I pray that he will be able to appreciate God’s gift of life to the fullest and I pray that it might be God’s will to let Joshua live rich and long. But I pray, perhaps more fervently again, for the strength of one step at a time, for Joshua and for all of us. I pray for a simple Providence, that God might simply provide us with what we need from day to day. Give us this day our daily bread.

We pray for peace. We try to believe, somehow, that everything is according to God’s plan, that God is just and merciful, that whatever the cause of Joshua’s suffering, God will restore him and reward him in the end. The very last of us, the least comforted, will be the first: God has promised this. I don’t know how to rest in this promise, but I am praying all the same for the truth of it, that Thy will be done and that I will be able to accept the pace of it even before I know the peace of it. We don’t pray to understand. We pray instead for God’s strengthening through the trials and for God’s encouragement by his presence and loudest of all for what we don’t have: that specific peace, the peace that passes all understanding: peace for Joshua, peace for each one of us brought together in prayer, peace on earth as it is in heaven.

We pray for hope. We pray to believe that some day, if we all keep praying, we will reach the place where there are no weaknesses or fears or pain or confusion, where there is only the certainty that God’s will is to take care of us —forever and ever. “The kingdom of God is very near,” always, and so it is: Thine is the kingdom, and so we pray, Thy kingdom come!

We pray for joy, for being able to one day look back and see all that God has given us —even a brain tumor, even if it is a cancerous one —as a blessing. “Blessed be the name of Yahweh!” cried Job in a windstorm. Hallowed be thy name, he cried. And I pray to have that same perception, that beautiful attitude, well before the final day, even as God’s will is done here on earth, as it will be done in heaven. “Blessed be the name of Yahweh!” I want to say, even in the midst of this misfortune, blessed be God for all things! Thine is the glory.

That is how I would pray all the time. But I admit, I cry more often out of fear and uncertainty and anxiety, and so there is one more thing I am learning to pray these days. I pray for forgiveness. I pray to be forgiven for my lack of joy and my weakening faith, even as I learn to forgive others for their own lacking —the deniers, the perplexed ones, the people who refuse to see Satan and the people who see more of Satan and less of God. I pray to remember that underneath our mixed emotions and amidst the storms around us we are all the same; lead us not into the temptation of thinking otherwise. Forgive us all, Father, and help us to have faith the size of a mustard seed to move each mountain before us. Or if it is thy will, Father in heaven, give us the strength to climb the mountain and to get to the other side.

At 520 Stewart we have prayed many prayers in the last several days, but each of our prayers are in the nature of the singular prayer that Jesus taught us to pray, the Lord’s prayer that is our prayer. In Jesus’s name we pray. 

Thank you God for teaching us to pray and for hearing our prayers, for giving us your strength, your healing, your providence, your peace, your hope, your joy, and for giving us forgiveness and a place for us beyond our mixed emotions.

Forever and ever, let it be so. Amen.

from March to December

Opening Allusions

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land 
(TWL), Dedication





          For Ezra Pound
          il miglior fabbro.

                    See Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio 26:115-117 (ca. 1321; 
                    tr. Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, 1867):

                    ‘O brother, said he, ‘he who I point out, ...was of the mother tongue
                    a better smith.’” 

                    This is Dante’s tribute to 12th century Provencal poet Arnaut Daniel. For 
                    Eliot’s further tribute, see TWL 428, where Dante’s Daniel speaks from 
                    purgatory. See also Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (1910), 
                    Pound’s first book on literary criticism in which he translated Dante’s 
                    phrase "il miglio fabbro" as “the better craftsman” and commended 
                    Daniel for his “refusal to use the ‘journalese’ of his day.”  

                    Eliot added this dedication to EZRA POUND in 1925, in Poems, 1909-1925
                    (Faber), three years after The Waste Land's initial publication. This was also 
                    the first edition in which Eliot included explanatory endnotes. After they met in 
                    1914, Pound was influential in getting Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred 
                    Prufrock published in Poetry Magazine in 1915. See Valerie Eliot, Letters of 
                    T.S. Eliot: 1898-1922 (1988). Pound was even more actively involved as 
                    a reader and editor for The Waste Land. See note at TWL 69, and for a 
                    sample of Pound’s editing see notes 166, 212, 219 and 293; for a fuller effect, 
                    see T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land, a Facsimile & Transcript of the Original 
                    Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, edited and with an 
                    Introduction by  Valerie Eliot (1971). 

                    See also Pound’s 1921 letter to Eliot just before The Waste Land was 
                    published, in V. Eliot, Letters. In a 48 line poem he called “Sage 
                    Homme,” Pound congratulated his friend for creating the poem but took 
                    his due credit for helping with the delivery. Pound’s poem begins: 

                    These are the poems of Eliot
                    By the Uranian Muse begot;
                    A Man their Mother was,
                    A Muse their Sire.
                    How did the printed Infancies result
                    From Nuptials thus doubly difficult?
                    If you must needs enquire
                    Know diligent Reader
                    That on each Occasion
                    Ezra performed the Caesarean Operation.

                    For a delayed response, see Eliot, Ezra Pound (Poetry, Sept. 1946): 

                    I have sometimes tried to perform the same sort of maieutic task; and I 
                    know that one of the temptations against which I have to be on guard, 
                    is trying to rewrite somebody's poem in the way I should have written 
                    it myself if I had wanted to write that poem. Pound never did that: he 
                    tried first to understand what one was attempting to do, and then tried 
                    to help one do it in one's own way.

                    T. S. Eliot gets the top billing for The Waste Land, but the first of his 
                    endnotes immediately credits both Jessie Weston and James Frazer.  
                    Eliot (1925):

                    Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental 
                    symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s 
                    book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge).  
                    Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate 
                    the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I 
                    recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any 
                    who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another 
                    work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has 
                    influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I 
                    have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone 
                    who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in the 
                    poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.  

                    Eliot’s opening note refers to ANTHROPOLOGY, the study of humanity 
                    across cultures and time and a discipline that was reaching a new level 
                    of popular appeal in the early 1920s, thanks in part to the works of 
                    Weston and James Frazer (see below, and see also Eliot’s later 
                    reference to anthropology at his endnote for TWL 218).  

                    See Jessie L. Weston, The Quest of the Holy Grail (1913), offering 
                    this summary of THE GRAIL LEGEND: 

                    In Arthurian legend, a Fisher King (the fish being an ancient symbol of life) 
                    has been maimed or killed, and his country has therefore become a dry 
                    Waste Land; he can only be regenerated and his land restored to fertility 
                    by a knight (Parsifal) who perseveres through various ordeals to the 
                    Perilous Chapel and learns the answers to certain ritual questions about 
                    the Grail. 

                    Weston concluded in From Ritual to Romance 2 (1920) that 

                    the woes of the land are directly dependent upon the sickness, or maiming,
                    of the King, and in no wise caused by the failure of the Quester.

                    See the Grail allusions at TWL 31-35, 201, 266-306, 386-390 and 424-426. 

                    See also James Frazer, The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic and 
                    Religion, 3d Ed (1914). Frazer’s work looks at ancient fertility cults and the
                    traditions of ritual sacrifice that have influenced our modern culture.  
                    Volumes V & VI of that edition present a two part study of Adonis, Attis and 
                    Osiris, respectively Greek, Phrygian and Egyptian gods of vegetation who 
                    are said to live and die annually.  

                    The themes of REVEGETATION, RENEWAL AND THE EFFECTS OF 
                    SPRING will be revisited at TWL 1, 4, 7, 71, 187, 198, 327 and 351 and 
                    at notes 1, 51, 55, 186, 197 and 389.

                    By citing Frazer’s work, Eliot introduced a multi-leveled allusion to the 
                    literary ESCORTS of Aeneas’s Sybil, Virgil’s Aeneas and Dante’s Virgil. 
                    Frazer prompted this by naming his book and illustrating its cover with an 
                    explicit nod to the “sylvan landscape” of J. M. W. Turner, The Golden 
                    Bough (1834), a painting that was also featured in an 1856 edition of Virgil, 
                    Aeneid (19 BC; publ. H. Graves & Co). For the painting’s story, see 
                    Aeneid 6 (tr. John Dryden 1697). Aeneas, in search of a new home 
                    after leaving his destroyed city of Troy, encounters the Sybil at Cumae. 
                    The Sybil agrees to act as his escort into hell, where he hopes to find the 
                    ghost of his father, but to enter, Aeneas first must give Proserpina, Queen of 
                    the Underworld, the bough of a golden tree that replenishes itself as 
                    branches are taken from it. 

J. M. W. Turner, The Golden Bough (1834) 

from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with annotations (and other explanations)