V E R S E and I M A G E

In the hardest days

with their outstretched nights,

whatever is beautiful

in the world recedes.

Light leaches from everything

we see, then. We can’t touch

ordinary goodnesses we might have

let buoy us. All of it fails. Sometimes,

we have to begin again

with something so obvious

and tired as the sunrise.

The wind in long grass.

The light holding back

our eyes from what is under

the surface of the water.

Then, the same light giving

a wrinkled glimpse of stones,

silt, and dark fronds waving

when we shift our stance

half a pace, or even turn

the angle of our face.

Some belief that goodness keeps,

that it might come back one day –

what could that mean today

when there is only the sun

returning in a flat peach wash,

the burning usher of another

Tuesday, coming in with the clanks

and grinding sounds of the city

shaking itself off, reanimating?

A waking we might observe

in colors we may discern

as all the life we lost burns out

of sight, beyond us now, as memory.

from The Long Invisible, Wildhouse Poetry, an imprint of Wildhouse Publishing. © 2024

❦ ❦ ❦

How much joy would it take to counterbalance the suffering of your normal lifespan? How would you quantify it, inchoate summation of glad moments over time divided by accrued heartache, grief, shame? What calculus might determine that life is worth living?

Last week in California a 26-year old man blew up a fertility clinic and himself. In an online manifest he described himself as “pro-mortalist.” Life is not worth living – bringing new life into the world is a crime. He is an extreme example of adherents of radical utilitarian philosophy. To achieve “the greatest good for the greatest number,” when society burns in chaos and personal joy is not to be found, when “good” is a rare and even unattainable commodity, the calculus of this logic dictates that numbers must be slashed. Decimated.

How much joy would it take? This morning I lean against the kitchen counter while my son stirs a pot on the stove. He is making his special stone-ground grits, with butter and cream, to take to Granddaddy in the nursing home. We talk about Granddaddy and my son’s reluctance to visit him, to open up to him. We talk about food and the kids and what remarkables we’ve each seen in the woods lately. For half an hour we are simply present for each other.

How much joy? My son is cooking in my kitchen because he now lives here with me. His marriage of twenty-three years has dissolved. Who can fathom the grief and shame he feels? My grief is bottomless. What can balance such an emptiness? Tonight my son’s daughter will visit to flip cartwheels in our front yard and help my son at the grill. She will pretend to be the maitre d’hotel while she sets the table on the porch and takes our orders. We will eat together. Soon he will drive her home and read Harry Potter before she falls asleep.

Why must there be any calculus at all? Throw it out. This moment is enough.

❦ ❦ ❦

And then, one day, you see

the copper teakettle on the stove

settled on its iron throne, precisely

in its place in the kitchen landscape.

Where, all these years, it has been

let’s not say faithfully. Not exactly.

But in its home, hallowed within

a scene so familiar it seems known.

The faint blue streaks of verdigris,

even the dullness of the handle,

become beautiful in this long-arriving

moment of recognition. Beneath

its dinge in the pockets of its dents glows

an undiminished gleam. Every morning

it has been lifted, filled, and carried.

Each day, it pours,. But you so rarely

touch it between its burning hours. Now

it is you that is filled as you long

for what you cannot see or say but sing.

from The Long Invisible, Wildhouse Poetry, an imprint of Wildhouse Publishing. © 2024

❦ ❦ ❦

At first the poems of The Long Invisible overpower me with sadness. I have to stop after each page and inventory my own life. I grieve for the inhabitants of these lines. I recall a poem by David Manning – Where does the fire go / when it goes out? Do our mistakes extinguish all the good we’ve ever done? Or that we’ve experienced?

I am rubbish at meditation. As soon as I try to sit in the moment all my failures and painful moments of the past jostle in beside me. Better to read a book of poems like Michael’s. Every moment is true. Pain and epiphany commingle. Here comes a bear, and wild flora, pelicans, all the things we love together. And love itself proves it is no stranger. Here it flares, even when we thought it had gone out.

We may be rubbish at love, but love is good at us. It doesn’t weigh the balance or work the calculus to some final solution. We only have to give love such a small piece of ourselves. Like poets do. Like this poet does, whose book in what it reveals and what it shares gives us not just a bit of himself but a bit of each one of us as well. Which must certainly be the greatest gift of all.

❦

The Long Invisible by Michael Dechane is available from Wildhouse Poetry.

❦ ❦ ❦

The texture of finely grated ginger.

Fernet’s herbal alchemy,

its tincture when I close the day.

All the surprising variegations in a cloud.

And seven black cows my neighbor keeps.

Some modest disappointments –

the kind that help me

know I’ve asked too much

and not enough.

Those parts of myself I kept

locked up on a kind of death row.

A list that needs

to interrupt me into attentiveness.

How this, a poem,

can move me beyond

what I knew, then further,

past what I can imagine.

I’ve come to love portals

into universes that do not exist

until we say they do.

Whoever you are, I love

your power. I hope it gives life

and sustains goodness for you, and everyone

connected to you: every one of us.

I know that I’ve come to love

may not love me back

yet. May I keep on loving

then. Keep practicing on stones,

long grass in the grips of a wind,

water, every way that it might be.

What a help that will be to me

as I turn, at last, to you.

The one I could not know

I was meant and made to love.

I am a stranger, a faceless other,

but you have invited me in.

You give me this time with you.

Forgive me for not believing sooner

in the gift of generosity,

in the hospitable spirit you have

harbored within, all these years, for us.

from The Long Invisible, Wildhouse Poetry, an imprint of Wildhouse Publishing. © 2024

❦ ❦ ❦