pilgrim’s
progress
16. If only you had
simply died.
17. “Yes, the
lessons do keep rolling in; I’ve noticed that too,” you wrote in
your last message to me. If this life is a flash quiz, I’m failing
it now, flailing to find answers. Or, answers fail. The wall’s gaps
hide lizards and mongooses. But you’ve slipped past my line of
sight, even through my fancy new glasses.
18. And then: “It’s
nice to think of putting down stakes for good, to lay out books and
my mother’s china in their proper homes.” [Pause] “...or less
transitory homes, that is.” Apt prosody of a Signal message. Signal
from somewhere the map on my phone can’t record.
19. Yesterday
morning a signal, perhaps. Lilith and I were climbing a hill when I turned toward the Koolau: a
double rainbow! The rainbow didn’t drift in wind,
it simply dissolved. Signal to sign, virtual to symbolic presence.
There’s presence in your death; I hear you whispering mantras to
our animals, blessing them. This morning: a solitary peacock on the road.
20. I hadn’t
written you back. I write you back. I cannot write you back. “What
happened, Sina?” I’d ask. Interlocutor silent. Not a failure of
the net, but of the breath I imagine on your side of it. You were
such a spider, weaving out and weaving in. Nets hold bodies, but not
their breath.
21. “The
revelation that poetry was alive and riding on the breath, line by
line, in a direct link to one’s heart,” she ascribed to Olson,
whose heart had nothing on hers. Her poem’s breath was slash,
oblique, an enjambed line within the line itself. You read as if
seated on the back of a gently bucking horse.
22. Radiance of
these mountains in the early a.m. Orange yellow cast over green,
under blue, and into white. Buddhist shawl sun slung around cliff’s
neck. Trees like fuzz on a head resuming its production of hair.
After chemo. After radiation. I brought Sangha to the hospital with
me; your nurse asked, “where did you get him?” Adoptive mothers,
both, we rolled our eyes.
23. We get our
lives, don’t we? As in, we acquire them without asking, or acquire
them again in adoption. What we don’t get are life plots, tangles,
figures of speech, surprises (that seem less so later). The shock of
your dying will stop kicking me in the chest, but don’t plan
on closure, dear Sina. It’s all detour now.
24. You were our MC
when we remembered the university’s dead, too often buried outside
of print or email or any notice at all. We performed memory before
the Chancellor (who cried), members of the counseling center (in case
someone freaked out), students whose peer had died by suicide,
colleagues who’d “passed on,” as they say. I prefer the
Victorian grave marker, “she fell asleep” on such and such a day.
The ground a comforter. Karl Marx and George Eliot whisper to each
other from their firm London mattress. The ocean will be your
comforter.
25. We set up
electric candles, the better not to burn down the Center for
Hawaiian Studies indoor/outdoor theater space. We posted photos of
the dead. We told stories about them. We pushed them, their names, up
grief’s brown hill. Mostly, they fell back to us, undeveloped
images still yearning for our company. Syntax is memory's machine. Pull
the weed whacker string, hear its whine. A man wearing a monkish
uniform will cut back the grass. Grief’s an act of editing.
26. Police say there
was an argument between you and her that “escalated.” You, who worked
so hard at right speech. Mostly, you were ignored. In the media narrative, you are
someone’s victim and someone’s aunt or sister. The real secret
was your presence. “She’s a mirror to others,” another author
said to me. How the kiss of billiard balls turns to aversion. How
your reflectiveness told us who we were, but left you out.
27. “Kali yuga on
a stick” is how you described our politics. “The present age,
full of sin,” Wiki tells me. The stick lent humor, as if sin were a
puppet, bouncing happily on a portable stage, making children scream
with delight. Yes, it’s farce all right, this lurching toward
apocalypse. All orange wigs and logical fallacy. Stick it to them.
28. Laughter may be
the best medicine, according to the Book of Holy Cliche. My meds
block my tears. They’ve built themselves a balloon inside my chest
that expands when I release my breath. My lungs want out, or at least
what’s inside them, prisoner of the Emotional Repression Complex
that knocks in code on my ribs. Let me bargain for my tears. Big
Pharma, goddamn you, my cheeks call out for refreshment!
29. Oh Sina, truth
teller, wise woman, purveyor of explosive laughter (which you offered without terms), colleague who never got to a meeting on time,
ethical overlord, pull your trademark scarf tight and gird your loins
for the bardo. Seven days in, the lay of the land is coming more
clear. I hope you have mountains there, and that they walk like
Dogen’s.
30. “farewell,
Expectations and False Hope!” you wrote on Buddha’s birthday.
“on second thought, don’t fare well. fare badly. fall / &
break your wily neck”-- Farewell, dear friend.
Note: title taken
from Sina’s poem, “pilgrim’s progress,” in alchemies of
distance. Other quotations are from the Introduction.
