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[with 3 poems by Michael Dechane]
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Something So Obvious
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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.
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Michael Dechane
from The Long Invisible, Wildhouse Poetry, an imprint of Wildhouse Publishing. © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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If nothing else will happen
to witness so much alive
may be enough. . . .
from New Year’s Day
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Why must there be any calculus at all? Throw it out. This moment is enough.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Meditation on the Heart
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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.
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Michael Dechane
from The Long Invisible, Wildhouse Poetry, an imprint of Wildhouse Publishing. © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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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?
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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.
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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.
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❦
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The Long Invisible by Michael Dechane is available from Wildhouse Poetry.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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What I’ve Come to Love
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The texture of finely grated ginger.
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Fernet’s herbal alchemy,
its tincture when I close the day.
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All the surprising variegations in a cloud.
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And seven black cows my neighbor keeps.
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Some modest disappointments –
the kind that help me
know I’ve asked too much
and not enough.
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Those parts of myself I kept
locked up on a kind of death row.
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A list that needs
to interrupt me into attentiveness.
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How this, a poem,
can move me beyond
what I knew, then further,
past what I can imagine.
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I’ve come to love portals
into universes that do not exist
until we say they do.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Michael Dechane
from The Long Invisible, Wildhouse Poetry, an imprint of Wildhouse Publishing. © 2024
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❦ ❦ ❦
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