Caliper

(for Brian)

"The cemetery expands its borders—
little milky crosses grow like teeth.
How kind time is, altering space
so nothing stays wrong; and light,
more new light, always arrives.”
[Spencer Reece, “At Thomas Merton’s Grave”]


What instrument do we use
to measure the capacity
of one’s character to
absorb loss?

The lies we live with
slide smoothly down the rule
only when the points
take & hold, without
slipping.

Then one day the beam breaks:
& every measurement is off.

------

I thought I'd always measure loss
on the little silver Mezurall
my father left in a drawer
(for me?)

It's in another drawer today,
(I kept it in a pocket for a while)
but I should have known:

Its length was never going to be enough.

-----

Your sister let each of us who were to carry you pick a pair of your socks from a plastic bag on the day we buried you. I chose Da Vinci’s calibrated man with his legs stretched into a pace that I'd never be able to keep.

-----

A life is lived on a hinge
that swings between eras
of unequal lengths & depths.

Sometimes it is a simple wind
that turns the gate between identities.

Then, again, storms destroy
what seemed so likely to stand,
so solid,so protected,
so easily measured.

When things finally settle again
& what’s left is gathered:
there is usually enough
to build the world again.

But once the rule is broken:
the measurements will
never again be exact.

Merton

November Poem a Day 2011: Day 10

             Locked in that strength we stay and stay

                 and cannot go away

                For you have given us our liberty.

Father Thomas Merton, "Freedom as Experience"

You, too, believed it lucky to die, didn’t you?

Sure enough in your zen-like cell, the earth,

as secure in your shrinking as a barn on fire,

snug as a hairshirt on sackcloth Saturday,

believing in the liberty of dead man’s row,

the sleep of monks at the bridegroom’s call.

Tell me, Brother Thomas, did the city do what the farm could not?

Was it liberation or desperation,

please don’t simply call it vocation,

that drove you to order,

divinely happy in the presence of so much disaster?

So content with what others simply cannot.

When you attempted to illuminate words with fire,

(or was it shadow the light with bird & wind)

did you have us in mind or was it simply meditation

gone down the mercantile way?  In any case,

I found myself once as if in the flames & your little book

cooled the fire, the singe marks have since disappeared.

One last thought before going separate ways,

like the farmer & his luck, remembering to lose

is nearly always worth it for the empty gain:

Did what you gave up ever knock on the midnight door?

Come haunting the slightest sleep, a lovely woman’s face?

A lone lily too early for Easter, yet too late for the sweetest snow?

These questions are worse than empty prayers, aren’t they

Father Thomas? Or is that exactly what they are?

The knock-knocking on a vacant door, or worse,

a letter sent without the requisite wait, or worse than that,

without the familiarity of shared self-regret.

Forgive me, Father, it’s just that I’m not ready to give up yet.