Sadhu (poem for mel)

(this is a very, very rough draft, but felt I had to do something with the complicated memory that is now surfacing)

To utter an epitaph for you – too soon,

too soon, and always too late – would require

not only

credentials I can’t

offer, and more than the memory of

the ink and smoke

plumage trailing you that

was my instant image of your

name, a name I’ve known since I can

recall anything. And your smile

that could have been a wince – oh you

were the opposite

of our dramatic masks, our

homage to your ancestry’s claim

on theater’s inception – comedy and tragedy played

themselves on your thin lips in a tug of war over

your teeth and what they held: lit. I was a partial

observer, even of those afternoons, the thumping

printers pumping out

the leaflets and fliers and

letters I’m not persuaded you ever

thought much of -

you weren’t a follower, a believer, but something

even rarer, a man with hands and a clear

understanding of what he can and cannot do

with them. This is not, I know, the opposite

of holiness. My father loved you. Who

didn’t? I remember, sometimes, I would bug

you with questions, trying to understand the

machines and the colors you fed them; you didn’t

really put up with me more than you put

up with anyone else. I never

minded. You were there, always, along

with the sky, democracy,

California. The thing about you, old

man, dying perhaps, in the same house where I

visited long days, where I ate my first

perfect exotic apricot, where caterpillars

spun, where once your son showed

me the giant plastic bags of

quartz and rocks

you had collected together

on a hike with a flashlight and it

seemed unbelievable that such

riches could exist,

could persist under a carport like yours, stored

in everyday garbage

bags and glittering - what

I would say of you – then,

now – is not that you were kind or nice

or upstanding, though possibly

you were those things.

But I don’t think you cared about that, and I don’t,

either. Imprinted here

something more solid, more dear, more

dear than I would like to admit, these years

in the future that seem impossible, and

the predicament of an end arriving

before I’ve even understood

how the middle is

going – (it occurs to me, there is

no way to construct a eulogy about

someone other than

yourself, and your own grief – who

am I mourning, who is really

dying?) -

how you were quite

plainly unadulterated with anything that was

not-you, and truly, how much closer to

the sacred heart of things can

we get?

I cannot say that any statue I’ve

met, any radiant figure or

transcendent star of

the spiritual path can claim it

in quite the same way.

And so – what, sweet soul, can I say? but that

your daily fulminations, ministrations of

gears and wrenching, gleaming arms -

grinning and

discerning who-knows-

what through the haze of your rhythmic domain -

who knows what you were

really thinking. What

I cannot speak

is what I want to say – and what I want

to say is unspeakable – perhaps you, too,

would agree, run it

through a machine, and to diminish

any argument to the

contrary, deftly and without

affectation but with the utter grace

that recedes from us when we try to

reproduce it and force it and

work it- you would have me, I think, roll

this up

and smoke it till it’s ashes, till

the rest of it is ashes,

because the rest of

it is ashes, isn’t it?

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