Today I find myself at the urgent care for pets, sitting in the same room my family was gathered into back in the fall to say goodbye to our beloved cat Ziggy. This time, I’m waiting for that interminable time for the prognosis on our kitten, Loverboy, who was just diagnosed with FIP, and while on meds, is still tanking. And so, I find myself sitting alone in a vet office, crying uncontrollably. These days, more often than not, it feels like all my decisions lead to the Flood, as if I’m somehow bound to Cain’s wretched genealogy, and while not boasting violence like Lamech or sleeping with gods, still coming to grips with the reality that Feste was right and “the whirligig of time brings in his revenges,” and the Ark door always seems slammed shut. There seems to be a myth that the floodwaters receded, but more often than not it feels as if perhaps they have not. More often than not it feels like we pray as the waters rise, and that, in the meantime, we are left in the chaos waters of our own making. It's not everyday that feels like this, but definitely today. So, here’s a poem about that:

How then do we pray?

How then do we pray

now that the door to the ark has been closed,

and the waters of the deep have begun to rise,

and the altar cannot be built,

nor the sacrifice slaughtered,

nor the flame lit?

Oh Jericho, I cry out for thee,

and for all the cities and all that was within them,

devoted to the LORD for destruction

from Goshen to Gibeon.

How then do we pray,

we the children of violence

and the offspring of fallen angels?

What language

could we have learned

from demons

other than the guttural incantations

of the abyss?

Oh Jericho, I cry out for thee!

our sister in sin,

our second cousin

on the other side of the flood.

What prayer could we have prayed

that might have remade us,

what language could we have learned

that might have turned us?

I see no sign of the rain stopping soon,

and while the waters may recede

and the mountains rise to receive the ark

the pattern still remains—

the darkness at the edge of all things.

How then do we pray,

our mouths stuffed with mud

or

our tongues burned to ash?

The crooked names we had learned

to call our demon ancestors

were not enough.

We were never whole

We were just waiting for the story to overtake us

and for the world to reawake without us.

(Wilde as Samwise at ComiCon)

Yesterday I asked my son, Wilde, if he wanted to ride his bike with me while I ran my 5k. In previous years we would have been well matched, both of us keeping an easy pace and neither needing to slow in order to stay side by side, and even sometimes in the not so distant past, I might have to watch my own pace. Of course, he’s grown and shoots off ahead and darts back to check in and ask where we will turn up ahead so he can play the new game of buzzing forward and then returning. A few months back, as o dug through some poems I had written for two of my children, I recalled a moment from 3 or 4 years back, a family bike ride, and Wilde still getting his bearings on his bike. It’s amazing la how moments like that continue to unfold inside of us as we carry them well past the moment, building a patchwork of narrative memories that articulate how we know one another, both past and present. They are a point of grace. I thought it would be nice to take a break from my middle aged confusion and post something that I simply consider lovely, a moment set in amber, heavy and precious. This was not an orally composed poem so the reading is actually me reading the poem instead of composing it.

Hey Guys, Wait for Me

for Wilde

I looked behind

just to see him trailing

by a quarter block,

but it could have been worlds apart,

my own voice

calling to me out of my childhood

a line I would not dare have uttered,

Hey, guys, wait for me.

It could have been

the definition of trust,

the knowledge that a sudden fear

would soon be remedied,

the open belief

embodied in a child’s voice.

It could have been

my father’s voice

calling me back to remember him,

or my own

calling back to my son

years from now

as he moves beyond me--

his open smile,

while remaining,

containing both wisdom and grief.

But at that moment,

I simply slowed my bike

and spun around

and circled back behind him

while once again

he began

to tell me

about the world.

"Yet if these are regrets they stir only lightly
	The children playing after supper,
	Promise of the pillow and so much in the night to come.
	I play to stay here a little while
	For these are moments only, moments of insight"

John Ashbery from The Task

Two weeks before my dad died, he stayed with my wife and I in Portland before jumping on a plane back to the Philippines. It was one of the best times we had spent together in quite a while. My wife was 5 months pregnant with our first child, and my dad, always the lover of children, was so happy for us. The final installment of Harry Potter was soon to be released, and he postulated his theories on whether Dumbledore was really dead, while puttering around the house, fixing odds and ends as father’s often do. We also talked a lot. He was exhausted. He had battled a life threatening disease 5 years earlier, but it had taken its toll. The ministry in the Philippines he had built all those years felt precarious, and even though he had lived a life of Faith, stepping forward onto invisible bridges, he just couldn’t seem to have any energy left to find vision in the heart of his current crisis, but instead doing what most of us do, and pushing forward with little hope. He was so tired. But he also opened his heart, and shared his doubts, and it was a moment where I felt like our relationship had shifted slightly, a sort of new frontier, and I remember looking forward to what would come next between us. Then he was gone. 18 years later, and now solidly into middle age, I’m still puzzling over some of those final conversations, and attempting to reach back further, hoping to find wisdom as I continue to live my life in a perpetual state of folly. This poem is part of a four poem series inspired by John Ashbery’s poem “The Task,” which I had memorized in my early twenties and carried inside of me all these years. These poems were orally composed in 2023, and while they might concede a little to the darkness, I do think they still hold at least a little flicker of light in this glooming world.

“For these are moments only”

It could be

because the days

are no longer growing shorter,

because the sunlight

peaks out over the horizon

a little longer.

It could be that.

It could also be

that although I have never noticed it

there seems to be a correlation

between daylight and hope.

It could be that.

Or it could be

that giving up

often feels like moving forward.

That when something finally

gives up its last breath

it’s like sunrises and sunsets

all over the place.

I don’t know about you,

but sometimes I feel

like I’ve had enough.

There are so many things

my father could have told me,

and maybe he did.

Maybe he did,

but I didn’t know

how to listen.

Maybe it is only now

that I could have ever

comprehended his vocabulary,

and so I dig back

trying to unearth the incomprehensible--

eye contact, a tone of voice,

the way his shoulders slumped

until they finally pointed towards the earth

and dug his own grave.

This is the problem,

isn’t it,

that we are always missing each other,

jumping on and off trains

at just the wrong moment.

We could describe the situation

a million ways,

and it would all be the same.

I wish my father had told me more.

He got so tired towards the end,

and everything seemed to hurt.

It’s as if the reality

that we lived

half a world away from each other

finally set in,

that he began to understand

the impossibilities of this life,

that he knew that most of his friends

had either died or deserted him.

Or maybe it was just

that I talked so much

because I was young.

Maybe I’m just

reading too much

into all of this.

Maybe it’s just

that the days are getting longer

Maybe daylight

Really does bring hope.

Who the hell knows?

It’s doubtful.

But who the hell knows?

I wish he was here though.

I could use some silence.

I could use those sad, sloped shoulders

and that ember of eternity

glowing just behind

his sad and silent gaze,

as if he already knew

something I still can’t understand.

Urine soaked trousers

And a pair of underwear

Neatly stacked on the edge

Of the sidewalk,

A roll of gauze and medical tape,

A cigarette butt, blood,

And a couple of other things,

The artifacts of existence,

The markers of a human life

That came and went

Some time in the night.

GUSTAVE DORÉ, THE INFERNO

“Only a flicker

Over the strained time-ridden faces

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Filled with fancies and empty of meaning

Tumid apathy with no concentration

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind

That blows before and after time,

Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs

Time before and time after.”

TS Eliot from “Burnt Norton”

“Just look at the filth you’ve made,

See what you’ve done.

Yet if these are regrets they stir only lightly

The children playing after supper,

Promise of the pillow and so much in the night to come.”

John Ashbery from “The Task”

These days my prayers have been shortened simply to “Jesus, please,” somewhat abbreviated from my last prayer which included “have mercy on me.” The give and take of daily life often amounts to the bottom dropping out from beneath or finding myself holding the match to my own dumpster fire. That is, I’m middle aged. For years now, I’ve talked about the Inferno as being a story of middle age, of believing oneself to have understood the mechanisms of this life, only to be lost in a forest, hoping there’s a saint in heaven beseeching somebody on your behalf. I would be grateful for a Virgil to help me on my daily journey through life’s Underworld, through all of this “tumid apathy with no concentration.” In the meantime, I find myself writing poems that perhaps relent to the chaos, that do not quite make the “Orphic effort” that Seamus Heaney has spoken of, hoping for a bit of a pass. This poem was actually an Ash Wednesday poem, so perhaps the dust and ashes of it makes sense, and perhaps days like Ash Wednesday linger for some of us. All that to say, I know I’m not the only middle aged person out there constantly overwhelmed by life’s frenzy and my own folly. Here’s the poem and the audio composition.

“just look at the filth you’ve made”

I can’t accommodate

everything all at once,

even though my daily calendar

Assures me I can.

There are rules.

I know this.

Rules as to how

one should organize their life.

I know this.

But then I just think,

the end is always near,

and then I think,

there are negotiations

to be made.

And then I think.

And then I think,

what does it matter

after all?

I can’t accommodate

everything all at once anyhow,

No matter what my calendar says.

There are so many ways

in which the world ends,

or maybe not the world

but our world,

or maybe not our world

but mine at least.

I think about this

all the time,

pushing back against it

wishing, praying,

subjugating myself to anything,

hoping, dreaming.

You know,

All the usual bullshit.

Meanwhile

the day is ending,

and there is no rest.

Meanwhile

every pursuit of happiness

has been laid to rest.

And the end is always near.

And there’s always an altar.

And we always

find ourselves

crawling up onto it

like some sort of

fantastical moment

in a horror film.

Or at least I do.

It is, of course,

the I, that is me,

that cannot accommodate

the everything all at once,

that crawls up on the altar

and hopes to Christ

that instead of being burnt to ash

I can wake up

and kiss my children

and send them off to school

and pretend

none of this ever happened.

“Ask her if she still keeps all her kings in the back row.”

Holden Caulfied

It’s never a good idea to read a poem you wrote for your daughter to your daughter in front of a crowd, but I’ve built a life on saying fuck it and going for it. Eliot is graduating from high-school on Thursday, so he mom and I did what so many parents are doing around town, we threw her a party and invited all of our friends, and all of her friends, and cooked too much food, and drank too much wine, and probably forgot to eat somewhere in there, and said all the things, and perhaps, somewhere deep inside hoped the party would never end. She leaves in 8 weeks, and so the intolerable process of holding her close and letting her go continues, of loving her innocence and hoping that she gains experience in at least a mildly painful way, all the while hoping to Christ that she “keeps all her kings in the back row.” But she won’t. She’s singing the same John Denver song I sang to my family all those years ago and “leaving on a jet plane,” scared as hell, I’m sure but still doing it. And so, like it or not, the first painful moment has already been mutually decided between us all, and so as we rush to send her on her way, buttoning up all the lessons we forgot to teach all along the way, we’re also trying to set some moments into amber, or at least linger together into the late summer nights.

Here’s the poem that I tried to read in front of a crowd. I had snuck in a few references to Prufrock in the poem after her namesake, but overall, it is a poem that a young father writes about his young daughter, and all these years later, still struggles to articulate the same hopes and fears. The audio is me reading the poem (sans tears) as opposed to the usual oral composition of the poem that I often share.

Counting to One Hundred

for Eliot

Your mother has framed a picture

your grandfather took of you and me.

You are young, and I am a young father.

In the picture you are holding a picture

that you had brought to show

the crabs we might find along the beach.

I am holding you, and we are standing

on the great trunk of a petrified tree

that must have been hauled to sea

and thrown back by waves

that can give and take as they please.

You have been sick for two days now,

and so I begin to make a list

of all the things from which

I cannot protect you

and bury it deep within my heart.

Today, as I carried you across the parking lot,

you counted from forty to one hundred,

your voice full of daylight,

as if there weren’t storm clouds everywhere.

In the picture I am holding you

and facing inland. I remember

thinking of all the devastation

that must have greeted that coastline

and what will come—the years

thrown on top of each other

and swept away like so many breakers

that beat the shore, then flee,

the picture you clutched in your tiny fist

for all those senseless crabs to see.

In the picture you are talking to me.

So many years that will be gone

before we can get the better of them.

If I could show you the mind of God

I wonder what you would see.

If I could somehow prove that starlight

is really both the same as joy and sorrow.

All that I can hope

is that no matter where I am,

I will still hear you counting to one hundred.

One could argue that I owe my life to Pentecost, or the idea of Pentecost, or that notion of that unconsumed fire burning in the imagination. It’s the day after Pentecost Sunday, and scrolling my Substack feed, I am realizing that I haven’t moved past it. I guess how could I. I’m a child of Revival. I was raised in Wednesday night prayer meetings and crossed the nation a number of times beneath canvas of the blue and white tent my dad pitched in town after town preaching redemption and Revival. My childhood a particular strand of the great American landscape, that somehow shares improbable boarders with Jack Keroack, Walt Whitman, Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams and so many more. Today though, an article by Carmen Joy Imes reminded me of another dusty road in which the origins of Pentecost might be found, that ancient wilderness road leading to Sinai. And I was reminded of that all consuming but unconsumed fire that kindled my imagination as a child and raged inside of me as a youth, and now, I continue to plot pilgrimages through my family’s history, through poets and prophets, to discover it. But. I’m often a day late. Or, just as a child when I could see myself walking up to the altar to receive a blessing or an anointing, I stay firmly fixed in my pew, watching a world into which I somehow could not gain entrance. Here is the poem that the Imes’ article prompted me to post, audio composition and transcription.

Holy Mountains

I had hoped to reach Sinai

but could not cross the sea,

or rather, I had hoped to reach the sea

but could not leave Egypt

or rather,

I was never in Egypt, I had never left Canaan,

and before Canaan had never left my home,

and before my home, had never been

scattered from the tower,

and before the tower

I was constantly lost in the waters of chaos,

and before the waters came,

I was murdered in the violence

that perpetuated them,

and before the violence

I stood between two altars and wept,

and before the altars,

I waited at the gates of the garden

eyeing the burning sword.

There I found the flame

that could not be extinguished,

long before Moses found it again

as a burning bush,

long before the children of Israel followed it

through the wilderness.

There it stood,

an unconsumed flaming guardian

demarcating the line between the gods

and the people of the earth.

If I could have left the edge of the garden

and gone down and wept between the altars,

and walked east of there,

and been slaughtered in the violence of the age,

and drowned in the waters of the flood,

and scattered in the folly of Babel,

and left my home to wander,

and left the alien nation of Caanan

to find shelter in Egypt,

and left Egypt to find myself at the sea,

and crossed the sea into the wilderness again,

and finally to that holy mountain

the sword still flaming,

but now a storm,

a storm of cloud and fire raging,

crying out to those who fear

something greater than death,

crying out to those

who will grasp the flaming sword

and step into Eden.

So, a few weeks back, I had a group of 5 poems all queued up and ready to submit to a publication, the prompt being something about the presence of God in the everyday. I had listened through and transcribed the poems, had them all arranged in the order I thought would hit best, and then somehow, and I think it was just busyness or some thin layer of anxiety that kept me from clicking and filling out the absurdly simple submission guidelines, I just didn’t drag the poems over the finish line. Or maybe it’s because somehow I knew that the poems vaguely hope for the presence of the divine in the everyday, but more often that not, reveal the exhaustion of the human experience and the constant missing it that occupies most of our days, or at least mine. That said, I do love this poem. I do love my middle aged fatigue and frenzy. I do love this everyday world that is so incredibly punishing and somehow simultaneously vacuous and full. For the most part, I hardly ever find any of the magic portals I had hoped to find when I had the energy to look for them, but then again, I have never stopped loving any of the magic portals. I hope to be hopelessly searching for miracles all the days of my life. Here’s the poem, audio composition and transcription. Happy Sunday.

The Speechless World

Somehow the plants all grow

too quickly these days,

or maybe it has something to do

with not noticing

and then suddenly realizing something.

The daffodils are already dead.

Cherry blossoms are everywhere.

The Ancient pear trees in the backyard

have transformed from old, gnarled beasts

into angelic beings,

robed in white blossoms.

Then suddenly,

the entire backyard is littered

with the rotting overabundance of the spring.

I guess perhaps,

it’s not that the plants grow quickly.

It’s just that I’m out of sync with everything–

the coming and going of things

cannot be framed properly

I think that I’ve labored under the misapprehension

that moments of knowing

will occur more frequently,

that I might be able to distinguish

between the fall and the spring,

that somehow the quality of rain and mud at different times of the year

actually mean something.

I should have known better—

all of the years of gazing

into the night sky and not having a clue

as to what the stars are actually trying to say.

I should have known,

after watching all of the years roll by

and not unearthing a single gemstone

in the backyard

while digging up weeds.

Or that the japanese maple in the front yard

truly has nothing to say to me–

or any of the trees for that matter.

How could I have known

just how silent the afternoons can be,

or that the wind will always remain unintelligible,

or that it was me who imposed

the shapes lions, and dragons, and bears onto the clouds,

and that none of it really meant anything?

How many worlds can I leave undiscovered?

How many seasons can sleep through?

And when I wake

it will not be to the sound of the rain

but to garbage trucks making their rounds

cleaning up the whole mess.

(My Dad giving me a haircut in southern India circa 1980)

The Gunderson family farm stood as an outpost on the edge of the Easter foothills of the Sweetgrass Hills mountain range. Looking west from our farm, while the range still maintained a unity, one could begin to perceive the distances between the individual Buttes and perhaps imagine a winding trail through them, and if one were to keep pushing west, would eventually come against the great Glacier mountain range. If you were to drive a little south of our farm, you would hit the Hi-Line, a stretch of interstate running alongside the BNSF Railway’s “Hi-Line,” sprouting from the foothills of glaciers past the eastern edge of Montana’s borders. A landscape of rolling hills, coulees, and massive rock formations sprawled out over once was an ancient sea floor. If you dipped into any coulee and gouge out a little into the crumbling rock, you might find an ancient crustacean or two, as I often did as a child. The wind along the Hi-Line is a near constant. Living there you learn to accept it, except that you also don’t, and are always thankful for any moment of respite.

In the early 70’s my parents were swept up in Charismatic Renewal that swept through the area, a movement that pushed back against the encroaching materialism that asserted itself after WWII. A romantic and mystic vision of the Christian faith in which the promise of day of Pentecost was a present reality, where signs and wonders never ceased, and where people, filled with the Holy Spirit, prophesied and spoke in the hieratic language of “tongues” or fell into spasms of seizure enraptured by the ever loving Spirit of God. A welcome respite from the constant monotony of material exchange, or stale marriages, and the echoing naves and turnstiles of rural Lutheran, Methodist, and Catholic Churches. In a sense, the West was the West again. Mountain ranges and cropland were imbued with richer meaning, all of them drenched in the “latter rain” of the Holy Spirit. Small churches sprouted up in homes along the Hi-Line from Cutbank to Havre, and families, not contended with a simply Sunday morning gathering, would sojourn through the week, making it to service after service where each of them could remind each other the Revival that had come upon them. Most of it is gone now. The families have died or moved away. The excitement and urgency tempered by the brutal realism of gravity while trudging forward has all but collapsed. But those were the days, and for my part, knowing that I owe my name and my life to them, am happy that they were there.

Yesterday marked the 18th anniversary of the death of my father, Dennis, and it felt appropriate that he was swept up within the proximity of Pentecost Sunday. He had a remarkable vision of life, grounded in the realism that farm life requires but reaching imaginative heights that far surpassed Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” in part because it was imbued with compassion and care. In 2017 I wrote quite a lot about that sense of revival and how it shaped my family and my life. It was a season of reclamation and remembering, of hearing the old stories and accepting them on their own footing. I love the audio composition of this poem. I can hear in my own voice the clarity that I had as I was automatically/verbally writing it, as if my voice carried a faint glimmer of the vision my father had as he preached the Gospel night after night in revival meetings all over the world. Here’s the audio and the transcription.

The Spirit

It was after they pulled off the Hi-Line

that the storm hit in earnest.

They must have driven thirty miles

outside of Joplin before it was a complete white-out.

They had known the storm was coming

But had thought

they could make it to Havre and back in time.

A Wednesday night bible study.

The Spirit of the Lord was enough

for them to go.

But they had pulled off the Hi-Line

before the storm hit in earnest

and were at least thirty miles out of Joplin

before it was a white-out.

Two miles from home,

when my Dad stepped out of the car

and pushed through the blizzard on foot

while my Mother drove

agonizing inch by agonizing inch behind him

along those gravel roads.

Those goddamn gravel roads.

Twenty-five years later

I drive behind my Uncle’s pickup

in a funeral procession.

Dust everywhere.

The entire world a narrow focus,

a two-lane street

in which one way is town-bound

and the other direction

is nowhere.

The Spirit of the Lord

had already left these parts,

and having returned to bury my father

I could feel

both of their vacancies.

Those goddamn gravel roads.

The dust or the blizzard

in front of us,

and my father

treading step by step,

leading the way.

(Jena in her natural habitat)

Everyday my wife shapes meaning for my children. They don’t always know this, and in fact most likely take for granted the rich structures she builds in which they have been fortunate enough to grow and thrive. Of course, from the moment our first child began to form inside of her, she began to embody an ontology, a particular sense of being through which new worlds would be built, hearts would be kindled, and light and life would take shape. Very quickly I began to discover a new and beautiful woman stepping forward, transformed by weight of her desired responsibility, and so when language took shape, my children would each recognize with an assurance they could hardly understand but felt in their fragile and knitting bones, Mom, Momma, and knowing without any idea of what knowing meant, that what they said was true. She has taught them other deep meanings since then, like home, and love, kindness, and family, and trust. She has quietly given them the deep language of mutuality and respect, not by heavy handed indoctrinations but through easy conversation. These may be the things they do not know yet, because they are things that have simply always been there in this daily life that she has provided for them, but I imagine that as they step forward into their own lives they will begin to recall the rich meaningfulness she imbued into our everydayness. Poets try for this, building ballads, epics, the compression of sonnets, tercets, the linked building of meaning with rhymes and repetition, while she simply says, I love you, and my children sense all of the surety that love conveys, all of the worlds within which a person can become more fully themselves, places of rest, words of exhortations, moments of grace, and rooms of repair. All of it there. She did this. She does this.

Today I’m offering up two poems. One I wrote just after our second child was born, and the other just a few years back. I love the newness of things in the first poem, and I love the richness of the second. Neither poem was orally composed, so the audio is me reading the poems as opposed to most of my posts where the audio is the actual composition. Happy Mother’s Day to my lovely wife, Jena, and to all.

The Moon, As Always, Is Singing

for Jena

Both darkness and silence,

the dreaming child and the watchful mother,

a house asleep, a house waiting for morning.

Wakefulness rests within it.

Your dream the dreams of a watchful mother—

a giraffe is tangled in the clotheslines,

hippos are dancing on the roof,

the moon, as always, is singing.

I stay up late and listen

to the silence of the house.

When I sleep, I dream of waking.

When I wake, I dream of staying,

and when I leave I dream of returning.

There is no silence greater

than sleeping children,

the weight of watchfulness

suspended in the darkness

like moonlight.

We do well together, you and I.

We talk of things as if they were

our dreams, but really, we have already

said yes to all we could ever want.

In the darkness I think of your silence,

your sleeping face relaxed,

and all the concerns of love

calmed in silence and darkness.

A Quick Sketch

For Jena

When you held out your hands

And told me they looked old,

I could not help

but take them in my own,

and trace the careworn lines

of strength and knowledge

that come with age.

Hands that having

formed a bouquet,

formed another and another

as declarations

that if the living

are to live

that beauty and excess

must always be gathered

as a bulwark

against time.

Hands

that heft the weight

of your children’s dreams,

their fears and faltering steps,

their visions of themselves

within the relentless

world of time.

Hands

that have held the dead

and comforted the living.

Hands that are constant,

a surety of sinew and bone,

tireless in their work

to arrange meaning

within time.

Hands

that are now in mine,

gentle and waiting,

a calm assurance

as we reconcile ourselves

to time.

There’s something about the constant struggle of everyday that makes a person understand the need for mercy. I understand that millions of dollars are made daily by spreading the message that we can truly be the person we want to be. I guess, as a Christian, I can be let off the hook from that pressure of being the protagonist in a narrative and simply understand myself as somebody in need of redemption. But more often than not, nothing feels made new, including myself. While at the center of Lamentations we find the promise that, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,

his mercies never come to an end;

they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness,” more often then not it’s simply that the morning itself does not feel new. More often than not the landscape is simply filled with “Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind.”

Of course, it’s Sunday morning, and here in Portland the sun is shining. It’s going to be a scorcher. I have my iced coffee and am about to head out for a run, so I guess it’s the perfect time to look these dire moments of existential crisis square in face. Or at least share a poem about them. Here’s the audio composition of the poem and the transcription. Happy Sunday.

We cannot be reborn

All of the echoes of earlier worlds

have been replaced by voices.

They are clear,

mid-ranged, speaking out in the sunlight,

their melodious and tenor pitch

reassuring us all that we have

finally arrived in that halcyon moment of being.

We are finally human after all,

simply ourselves.

We are no longer

image bearers

cursed to carry

the mantle of the most high god.

The sun was shining today.

I kept thinking I should get outside

and do something about it,

that I should scramble and get home early,

and take the kids to the park.

The breath of god isn’t in us anymore.

We’re just mud people, stiffening in the light.

I keep thinking

of these sunny afternoons

as talismans,

as if i can wear these moments with my children

around my neck, or carry them in my pocket,

turning them over and over again

and praying against the darkness.

Of course, i didn’t make it home in time

and simply rushed dinner out

and drank a little too much

and shuffled them off to bed.

I imagine we all know by now

that Eden was never a place

that any of us ever imagined existed

much less believed in.

We could never have been there

to name all of the animals,

or fall in love with our existence for the first time,

or listen for the disembodied sound of god

as he rustled through the trees

of the early evening.

It is such a pain in the ass

getting home a little later than you had meant to.

Everything is wrong-footed,

and try as you might

you spend the whole evening

fighting insignificant proxy wars

and losing every single one.

Thank God all the fantasies are gone.

Thank God all the myths of Eden have been vanquished.

Thank god we are only here for ourselves.

Thank god we have finally been left alone.

I’m always surprised

by the fact that the sun is shining,

and my children will play outside in it

even in the coldest of weather.

Tonight they came home just after sunset,

hands and faces freezing,

talking so loudly that I could hear them

before they stepped inside.

There are no worlds left to us

where cherubim guard entrances into Eden,

and it’s not like I even want to go there.

I just want to get home early enough tomorrow

to take my kids to the park

before the rain sets in again.

(My children in the park in Spokane, WA, the day of the poem)

Shortly before my uncle died, my aunt notified the family that while he could not respond, he was still conscious and if we could, could we call and say our goodbyes. It’s always disorienting speaking to somebody who knows they are dying, as if you are speaking in one of those massive halls with St. Peter himself taking notes not just on your words but how they echo and resonate against that vast empty space. Knowing this, I had planned to tell him I loved him and share some memories I had of him that built the man I would continue to remember. I told him how much his brother, my father, had loved him. And remembered to add in a funny shared family story because that has always been the way of us Gundersons, to store up and share not just our own memories but of aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins, of our long residency on the the family’s hundred year farm tucked up into northern Montana. And then I said goodbye, knowing that it was certain and final, letting go once again not only to the dying man on the other end of the phone, but to my father, my cousin, my grandmothers, and friends who have gone but briefly returned to help me send off my Uncle.

This last month I was honored to be asked to submit some poems for a collection that was released as poem a day through April by Blue Rivers. It felt right that they chose the poem Spring Burials that I had written for my Uncle, but also for my children. I composed the poem a few months after that phone call, the silence on the other end of the line still echoing through the lines of the verse. Here is the original oral composition and a link to the poem in Blue Rivers. Do yourself favor and stay a while and read some of the other poems. It is a very strong collection.

And here’s a link to the poem:

Spring Burials

“Shabbat comes with its own holiness; we enter not simply a day, but an atmosphere. My father cites the Zohar: the Sabbath is the name of God. We are within the Sabbath rather than the Sabbath being within us.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel

One would think that by the age of 48, a person could actually organize their life in a way that allowed at least for some measure stepping away from all of the toil and clutter of the everyday, but I must admit, I’m not clever enough to have learned that trick. It’s Sunday morning, which means a brief moment lingering in bed, scrolling through Substack to see what all my contemporaries are writing about today, while watching the cat who harassed me all night long sunbathe at the bottom of the bed. It’s the brief moment before one has to push back against the mounting have not dones of the prior week and the to do’s of the upcoming one, all the respite of a brief suspension before the pendulum swings back. I imagine if I were in church it would be the same, the attempt to enter into the sanctuary and actually allow it to provide shelter from the storm, to allow the table, and the cup and the bread to absorb all of my attention, to focus for one moment for once in my damn life. Instead, I’m offering up a poem, perhaps vegetables instead of the choice fatty cuts on the altar, about sacred spaces and the contemporary dilemma of attempting to enter into them. I write about this a lot, so don’t be surprised when I’ve offered up ten poems talking about the same thing. I always wonder though what wins within the poem. Did I relinquish ground even within the attempt to push back in poetry, or did the act of poem making contain within itself enough resolve to demarcate a line of defense. Anyways. Here’s the poem. Oral composition first and the transcription.

“A last level of anxiety”

One would think

that there’s a trick

to get out of this,

or that the expectations

had been set too high in the first place.

I can’t imagine how I got here,

And yet, here I am.

I’m not making excuses.

I’m just trying to figure out

what to do next.

There’s nothing in this world

like High Places or Holy Mountains.

I mean you can

take a nice walk in the park

or go for drive

or even visit a national park

and witness something spectacular.

But I’m not talking about any of that.

We should all admit by now

that none of us wanted

to re-enter our daily lives

better, and stronger, and more capable.

We just wanted to get out of them,

or we had just wanted to return

and find that they had been transformed.

And perhaps there are Holy Mountains.

They’re just simply uninhabitable,

So they only exist in theory

because we can never dwell there.

Or at least, I can’t.

I’m always surprised

When people look forward to things.

I mean, I do too,

but you would think

that we should all know better by now.

It’s not that expectations are never met,

or that there are no truly lovely moments

that seem to push back

against the insurmountable weight

of just everything all the time.

It’s just that

even if you narrow it down

to something simple

like going to sleep,

you find yourself

waking up in the middle of the night

and ruining your own expectations,

or a rare night alone with your wife

ruined by a stray word.

Or, or.

Perhaps there are Holy Mountains,

Perhaps the gods still roam the high places,

waiting for the flood to return,

waiting for all expectation

to become subsumed by desperation,

waiting for impossible journeys to begin,

and for those who miraculously

found their way above the floodline

to rest for a moment

while the waters recede.

Last weekend, my son Ezra, hands covered in Coconut coir and soil as he prepared a jumble of pots for spring seeds, chatted easily with my wife about their spring and summer plans for the backyard. They named off flowers and plants they envisioned in different pockets of the yard, held up seed packets and read instructions together. A spring afternoon filled with the easy commerce of a language of commonality between a mother and child. More often than not, he tends towards silence or sparsity, still thoughtful and congenial but not overly effusive. It’s always delightful though when the mechanisms behind those almond shaped brown eyes pour out in his mild mannered tone. His quiet nature should never be confused for a lack of intensity or curiosity, as he has moved from mastering the Rubik’s cube to entering arm wrestling competitions to picking up a Trumpet over the holidays and having the temerity to approach his Jazz band instructor in w short 2 months and ask if he could switch from trombone to the trumpet on a given song. But I love it when he settles into a chatty conversation, perhaps because it is rare, but more than likely, because as with all my kids, I simply cherish those moments of proximity and easy intimacy. Here’s a poem I wrote when he just began to speak. Unlike the orally composed poems I usually share this was written, so the audio is actually me reading the poem instead of composing it.

A Morning Song

for Ezra

1.

A thing takes shape

when you say it,

a knee, a sock, a nose.

Your voice,

astonished to have found

solid ground,

things to attach itself to.

Your voice,

the shape of my future

a morning song.

2.

Picking up my guitar

I pull a small car from inside of it,

also a book and a pacifier.

I know you have been there

and hope you never leave.

3.

There may be times

when your words simply echo

in the darkness

or cannot

keep a woman

or fail you

in a game of wits

or make your sister cry.

You will find

that no matter what

you proclaim

it is never

enough.

This life is

both endless and small

just like your body

that heaves and writhes

as you weep

because I have

made you share your toy.

You are my boy, my love,

my army of fury, my small tower,

my devastation and repair.

If you do not know now,

then you will know soon

that the abyss walks beside you,

that death cradles you,

and that your voice

along with everything around it

will be snuffed out.

Rembrandt “The Super at Emmaus”

“yet

Who could complete without the extra day

The journey that should take no time at all?”

W.H. Auden “The Crossroads”

The problem with Divine Revelation is that it’s just so damn confounding. It doesn’t work as things should. Tragedies still hold profound moments of grace and beauty even as all of the calamity of human drama continues in its torpor. Somehow the God with us of things remains elusive on most days, appearing in temporal flashes as Eliot describes at the end of Burnt Norton:

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage

Quick now, here, now, always—

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.

Or, as the with two disciples who set off towards Emmaus, moving away from the announced resurrection, plodding a journey into the dusk, we may find ourselves walking alongside Jesus himself, who on the journey teaches of himself within all of our holy scriptures, and still not recognizing him, invite him into our home only for him to reveal himself in the moment of breaking bread and then vanish.

Most of my days are journeys into darkness, moving away from the announced resurrection, and yet for years now, I’ve been haunted by this word, Rejoice. I’ve written several poems around it. The notion of rejoicing seems so total and all encompassing, as improbable and confounding as God with us. Here is one attempt to dig into that journey where all is revealed and still the darkness remains nearly impenetrable. It’s from my 2017 Lent cycle so here are both the audio composition and the transcription.

Rejoice

Had you walked the road to Emauss

you probably would not have seen,

as the disciples did,

a stranger come alongside

and unfold the nature of God.

Things like that

don’t happen often.

Or perhaps the road to Emauss

could be any road, anywhere,

and resurrection

could be close at hand.

Nothing points to this.

Herod still killed

all the children in Bethlehem.

The coming of Christ

did not put an end to tragedy.

It is more likely than not

the road to Emauss

might be any road

you happen to be walking down,

and that the homeless man

huddled by the side of the street

might be a god

wrapped in the rags of a glory

you cannot understand.

Nothing will be made new

as we had hoped,

because everything has already

been made new.

The time for rejoicing is now.

All worlds

have already been conquered.

Do not hope to arrive.

You have already come and gone.

The time for rejoicing is now.

As far as I can tell

all of it points to the divine—

the burning in the streets,

the bruised heel,

the broken rib.

The end of the world

has come and gone.

The time has come to rejoice.

Rubens’ Christ’s Charge to Peter 1616

Thanks for journeying with me through Lent. As a final installment, I’m offering up the final poem from the 2024 cycle. I found myself in The Gospel of John, perhaps because I was looking for grand ontological language, the clear throated “I ams” of a divine Messiah. I found all of that, but also a few moments both of human determination in the posture of Thomas, ready to charge into the Lion’s Den alongside his Rabbi, and an unexpected moment of emotion and tenderness in the final scene between Jesus and Peter. The Crucifixion always makes sense to me. All of Lent does. The march to the cross does. But, like most, I’m completely confounded by the Resurrection. And after the Resurrection, the sort of godlike body of Jesus doesn’t feel as real as the one that was whipped and beaten a few days earlier. But the moment between Jesus and Peter hit me as incredibly real, incredibly believable, and filled with all of the human drama that is somehow redeemed through a fantastical resurrection. It is one of the narratives in which we see the actual mechanism of resurrection, how the Resurrection acts in a profoundly transformative way. This year, I’ve read a lot of Good Friday sermons that have attempted to reduce the Cross to a simple act of defiance against Empire, that have stripped the narrative of any of its roots in Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus, Isaiah, and have placed Jesus in the place of the victim of the violence of Empire, bereft of any divine Messianic fulfillment or atoning mediation, void of Abrahamic promises, and tropes of exile and redemption. With these sermons as a backdrop, my little stab at being hopeful in these poems feels like I have actually embraced a fantastical ontology. And perhaps I have. Perhaps I’m closer to accepting Resurrection than ever before. Anyways, here are the audio composition and the transcription.

“You will stretch out your hands”

When the Prophet speaks,

eyes gazing into the future

but speaking to the present,

or eyes gazing into the past

but speaking into the future,

or eyes filled

with the horror of the present,

the unlearned lessons of the past,

while the grim prognostication

Tumbles off of the tongue.

Except in this case

there seemed to be a tenderness,

even as the past

was held up to the present,

and the death sentence of the future

offered alongside

an exhortation and an invitation.

The fear of the past

overcome by the unbelievable

reality of the present.

The gruesome reality of the future

overcome by the presence of the man

offering the death sentence.

The repetition of the exhortation

echoed like a bell

sounding off three times

against the sins of the past.

New realities were beginning to emerge–

an entire narrative that had yet to be told.

Yet there in that moment

all those realities had ceased to transpire.

What would come

would be all of history,

but what was then

was a moment between two men

just before the story wrapped up

and the protagonist walked off the stage.

As a child

prophecy seemed to occur everywhere

at the church, in the house,

in the late night meetings through the week.

We lived in the Great Northwest Plains

so the prophecies were filled

with silos and ripe or rotten grain,

with combines and urgency

and early and latter rain.

Or rain that came too soon.

Or hail that destroyed the crops.

I did not hear in them

the tender forgiveness of a friend

who had been abandoned by another,

an invitation into a world of becoming,

the newness and fullness of things

about to occur

just as the scene ends

as it always does

with a reminder of one’s mortality

of what must be done within this life.

And somehow

even the image of death

Seems to be framed

in a vision of exaltation and glorification

The day after my cousin Joshua’s funeral, my Uncle asked if I could help him and his wife clean out Joshua’s apartment. My flight was scheduled for early evening, so I spent the morning sorting through the last things Joshua surrounded himself with before he finally left it all behind. The process itself was a sort of physical lament, hefting boxes filled with memorabilia, sorting through what should be saved and what should be discarded, the language of the day attached to the matter at hand, embodied in our shared task.

After we had packed away the final belongings of Joshua’s life, my Uncle asked if I could accompany him to the place where Joshua took his life, a tree centered in a nearby park. Climbing the tree one would have a perfect view over the park and beyond, a look-out over the horizon.

It makes sense that within ancient Laments people tear their clothes and beat their breasts. People cry out. Language has not even been formed to give voice to the grief. It’s just an inarticulate physical response. Words come later. We shouldn’t rush them.

Years after his death, I finally found words for that morning, that sacred space that my Uncle invited me into. I unpacked the artifacts Joshua carried with him until those final moments. First I orally composed the poem. Then I transcribed it. Then I wrote a song. Here’s the oral composition and transcription, followed by the song, Songbirds:

Recovery

for Joshua James O’Neil

It makes sense

that you kept so many

of your mother’s possessions

close to you,

the castanets from her trip to Spain,

her Nordic stockings,

her high school diploma,

an essay she had written in college.

We found it all

as we cleared your room,

your father asking me

to keep each artifact

as we found them.

If only talismans

such as these

could have warded off demons,

but memory and forgetfulness

are all the same.

All those horded memories,

but nothing that could recover her.

I wonder what songs the songbirds sing

as they retreat into the night.

Do they lift their heads into the darkness

and sing with delight?

Or do I simply hear them screaming

in agony and in fright?

There are no visions left

when darkness is our guide.

And while the sun rose,

and you held

your final consultation with the earth,

did you reach

for your mother’s hand

as you stepped off the branch—

legs swinging

and her holding you

in that emptiness of being?

There’s no recovery

from that kind of fall.

No gravestones to roll back

or gods to praise,

just a son,

clutching his mother’s belongings,

stepping into infinite sunrises,

and hoping for the best.

Songbirds

Did you find your way home?

Or did you just find a world

That has not come

Like the sunrise when the darkness is done

A child’s song that cannot be undone.

But what did those songbirds sing

As they flew off into the evening?

Did they laugh or did they scream?

I don’t know if they said anything.

Did she try to hold you tight,

Or pull you back with all her might?

A mother’s arms,

A broken bough.

Well I guess that she can hold you now.

But what did those songbirds sing

As they flew off into the evening?

Did they laugh or did they scream?

I don’t know if they said anything.

We just could not see you in the night.

We just found you when the day was bright.

The wound was raw and the silence stacked.

And that world to come gives nothing back.

But what did those songbirds sing

As they flew off into the evening?

Did they laugh or did they scream?

I don’t know if they said anything.

In the spirit of finality, and because I feel the need to wrap up the Lenten process with a final piece, I squeezed in a song, written just moments ago, and as part of my creative process is unflinching vulnerability and the sharing of hyped raw material, I am posting the lyrics and the recording I did minutes after completing the piece (knowing that no song is ever complete but only ready to move onto the stage of singing through it and finding it over and over again). Here’s the recording and the lyrics. (And yes, I know, it’s not a triumphant Easter chorus. I am aware, but it’s what I got).

Easter Morning

All of these common ways

Make no connection.

You see the sun go down

You’ve seen a reflection.

You could call me by my name

I still won’t hear ya.

You could call on Jesus Christ

It still won’t fear ya.

Oh, Any one of these days

Should have been enough.

But I’ve forgotten what to say

Since the devil lost his touch.

And I’ve forgotten how to pray

But that doesn’t mean that much.

And if I could find out how to stay

I could find out what to trust.

It’s just the Holy Ghost

Out in the courtyard.

He’s crying because St. Peter

Lost his way.

He knows the wrath of god

Is always with us.

And that the son of God

Has gone away.

I thought the world was better

When you were with me,

That shining stars

Were better than our dreams,

And that the mountains of the world

Could fall before us,

And we would laugh

And eat our cake and drink our tea.

And girl, if you are for me

Who could be against me.

I can’t find a single savior

Among the trees.

And the sun is finally

dying in the west now

And darkness falls

As certain as anything.

For nearly a year after my father died I could not write a poem. Perhaps it was also that I was a new father and that between the grief of loss and the newness of my daughter, I was simply too overwhelmed processing life and could not simply write about anything in the abstract or find language for the present. The first few lines of poetry which are in this poem ruminated inside of me for a while: “now I know the weight of a body reduced to ashes.” I just had that line and felt like there was a ln entire poem there. As Easter approached that following year, the line kept building inside of me, as I began to dread the lack of any resurrection that would be underscored by the holiday. This was long before I began a practice of poem writing through Lent but telling that my first poem coming out of that period of hollowed out Lament was this one. All of these nearly two decades later, I love this poem and the grief feels as fresh and poignant as it did then each time I read it. While the poem may claim that there’s no resurrection, I would point to the end and ask if perhaps there’s a slight of hand, a quiet but perceptible shift making way for at least the hope of resurrection. Happy Easter.

Easter Morning

1.

The rain drenched streets, the sodden soil,

the sun, though risen, hidden behind the clouds—

it could be spring or a midwinter morning.

Birds sing year round here.

The cold is not often that cold.

There is nothing that tells the time,

just a gray sky and a resurrected worry

to carry throughout the day.

2.

It could have been a different day

in each corner of the sky—

in the north, a summer storm,

the west cradled the sun

while the east and south

held all the unconcern

of a blue horizon,

untroubled and endless.

In my heart

it could have been any other day

just not the one

I spread my father’s ashes

on such recalcitrant

and unyielding soil.

3.

Easter morning and yet

it could be anytime of year.

The birds sing all the time here,

and death’s dull and unmysterious finality

has taught me nothing except

that now I know the weight

of a body reduced to ashes,

the grit and the heft of it.

I have tested its weight

against the wind

and found it light.

When my family moved to the Philippines in 1987, we had no concept of how intense Holy Week would be there. On Black Saturday, the entire city of Manila would essentially close shop. Ortigas and Edsa, two of the busiest streets at the time which would generally be crammed with Jeepneys, Busses, Motortrycs and cars all honking in a medley of horns lay quiet and open. The drama of the week now accentuated in an overwhelming hush.

Today’s poem comes from the 2019 poem cycle, which emerged out of the loss of a dear friend on January 1, my birthday, of that year. I had, as one should, or at least I should, prayed for a miracle up until the moment of her death. The poem rests within the sort of absurd space one inhabits after death claims yet another person from us, nullifying meaning, bankrupting the miraculous.

If it seems like I cheated at the end of the poem, that may be true, but perhaps only in the way that something as improbable as hope still remains. Easter Morning in all of its promise of resurrection always feels so far away, even on the day before it. And unlike Manila in the 1980s the streets remain crammed with commerce and so much noise. So perhaps that’s what’s happening at the end of the poem, a vision that remains slightly elusive, slight intangible, a celebration that one must ask if they even have the energy to join. Here is the oral composition and transcription:

Some days will end this way

The jeremiad articulation

stuck in the throat,

dust in the eyes.

I’ve never seen a sunset

as commonplace as this one–

no pink horizons,

just a sudden gloom

and an eventual darkness.

So many greetings throughout the day,

gestures of faith and promise,

a quick hello,

and drink at the bar

on the way home.

Some days will end this way,

the complaint of Arjuna

still left to be told

and without it

no revelation of god,

no keen insight

into how all this futility

can be transformed.

Illuminations postponed

until after the seven o’clock news,

and hours and hours

photoshopping a life

that was never meant to be.

Some days will end this way,

clouds breaking

at just the wrong time,

the sun no longer there

to be let through.

Whether the shades are open

or pulled closed

it makes no difference.

Redeemers and possibilities

have both decamped

and packing up

took with them

every iteration of a promise.

I can’t speak for others,

but if I might ask on their behalf.

Why is the darkness here?

Who was it made for?

Why should I rest?

Isn’t burning and dying enough?

Some days will end this way

while others that have not come

will remain illusive

always on the horizon–

a forecast of things

that will never arrive.

And deities, bending down to listen

will forget what they heard.

Not that it would have mattered,

How could it have?

They were never like us.

They just dressed the part.

It’s not that I’m angry.

I’m just stranded.

I like hopeful things,

and feckless musings,

and tents pitched in a field,

and party lights,

and bouquets that will be trampled

when the dancing starts,

a heart that will beat

late into the morning,

and bright eyes shining

everywhere.