Poetry Thursday January 25

I see Christ in an hourglass
And in a large, pink artificial flower

The shepherds have gone home
The angels are boxed up

But I still see colours in the night
Hands cupped over eyes
Pinpoints of light come and go

The crab walks sideways
And I allow myself
To find new direction

From forgotten joys.

Blessings

She runs downstairs,
In her blue and red Spider-man pyjamas
Gleeful, happy, enraptured.

Shoves little socked feet into little winter boots
Opens wide the front door
In one grand movement.

At last! Finally! It’s come!

Cold wind gusts inside the open front doorway.
From my room, I hear sounds of scraping, shoveling
Then squeals of delight.
"Dad!" "It snowed! It snowed! It snowed"

Tears come to my eyes and thanksgiving.
Blessings

Pansies in a shot glass

Robert looked to his right at the thin elderly lady beside him. He didn’t know her. He should know her, but he didn’t. Did she live in his apartment building? Had he worked with her at some time? Robert watched her pull down the hard leather cushion that was attached to a lever in his pew. It was time to pray.

The priest began with his Our Fathers and the congregation joined in. Robert felt his knees wedge into the cushion. He bent his head forward, but kept his eyes open and looked at the books held inside the shelf in the pew. Two copies of everything. The smallish red Book of Common Prayer, the larger red hymn books, one with music, the other without, and two Bibles. The woman beside him had her hymn book open to one of his favourite hymns, a hymn that wasn’t slated for the funeral, St. Patrick’s Breastplate. Christ within me. Christ around me. Christ before me. Christ behind me.

Robert remembered as a boy always feeling the urge to take a quick look behind him to see if Christ had sneaked up on him from behind. Now such things didn’t matter. They seemed silly.
He flipped through the hymn book to look at the hymns that had been chosen for the service. Nearer my God to thee. The Old Rugged Cross. Amazing Grace. Martha had chosen the classics.

Robert looked around him. He recognized many people. Martha sat in the front row on the right side. She was wearing an elegant long black dress with a silver scarf tied around her neck. She, too, was flipping through the red hymn book. They’re getting rid of this one, she’d said, one day, coming home from church. They’re splitting up with the Uniteds and selecting hymns for a new Anglican hymn book. Robert remembered how she’d looked that Easter Sunday, in a Spring dress with a floral pattern. Her cheeks were rosy. The perfume of spring came in the door with her, and she left the door half open behind her, flushed, happy. She was carrying flowers from the altar that she was to drop off with an elderly shut-in that afternoon. She seemed all flowers. His Easter flower.

Now flowers were on the coffin. Martha knelt quietly in the pew, wholly uninterested in them, merely fingering the hymn book that was soon to be replaced. Robert longed to go to her, to run his hand through her thick brown hair, to place his hand on hers. To hold her, feel her body shake its sorrow into his. But this was not possible.

The service began and Robert looked for the one person he knew would not be here. Adam. Adam would be smoking somewhere this morning, alone in his apartment. Adam was a recluse, happiest working on his paintings, throwing the proverbial cans of paint at large stretches of canvas. Of course, this was only the image that Adam liked to keep. He never threw paint around. It was too expensive. But he worked in his old black pants with the pair of suspenders that had the Disney motto on them. He’d be busy creating expansive blue backgrounds.

Adam wanted to paint everything large. The sea. The blue sea, he’d say. I want to paint blue the way its never been painted. And on the sea he’d paint an infinitesimally small figure. “That’s Christ” he’d told Robert one day, “walking the water.” Robert squinted hard, looking for the little dot of a man that was supposed to be Christ. “I don’t see Him,” he’d said. “You’ll have to paint Him larger.” But Adam laughed, lit a cigarette and clouded the room with smoke so that even the clear blue sea he’d painted was covered over.

And Adam wasn’t here at the funeral. Of course not. It wasn’t his scene.

Robert watched the priest in white robes with a cord tassel belt come forward. He was perspiring as all good priests are supposed to do. Perhaps they were always hot in those robes, or perhaps God required a bit of sweat from them. They weren’t really doing their job if they weren’t sweating by Holy Communion.

Robert watched as Sadie moved up one row to sit by Martha. He felt relieved. Sadie wasn’t the type to hand out kleenexes at funerals as if they were cure-alls. And Martha wasn’t crying anyway. No waterworks from her. The waterworks were inside her, overloading the pipes, leaking invisibly inside her, unable to find their way out.

Try crying, he mouthed inaudibly.

Robert looked away from Martha, who wasn’t looking in his direction anyway. She was bent forward, and Sadie had her arm around her.

If only Adam would come. Adam should rightly be here. But Robert could imagine what Adam would say to that.

“God’s house?” he’d smirk. “No one I know would be in there,” he’d laugh. And he’d carry on painting that new work he’d started, just a couple of weeks ago. It was all different shades of red.

“What are you painting now?” Robert asked when he visited him. “Hell?”

Adam looked back at Robert, surprised. “Is that what you see?” he asked. Instead of being at the funeral, he would still be at work with the red paint, mixing different shades, painting and repainting, then drawing circles in the cream cheese bagel with his finger.

But the poor sweating priest was at the funeral, and he was speaking about the deceased. Of course he had to say something. He never knew the man. But he was doing his best to fill in the picture. He was like a photographer at a shopping mall studio. He had to choose an acceptable facsimile background so that his model wouldn’t stand out in ugly relief against an off-white wall.

This priest, at least, had the good taste not to present the deceased in front of a Christmas background - a gaudy tree with tinny silver bells, oversized red felt ribbons, and a dog he didn’t know in the bottom corner of the shot.

Robert looked look again at Martha. It’s almost over, he whispered silently. Hang in there for one more verse of this wretched song. Martha was standing now hunched over like a marathon runner who has suddenly come down with a paralyzing case of M.S. Her confidence was gone; fear has taken away her mobility, even her desire to move.

She was so different from that Martha who came home from church that Easter Sunday. Then she smiled and laughed, swept the skirt of her dress round and round the room. Her deep brown eyes glowed and her gorgeous alto voice spoke warmly and kindly. And when she laughed, even the most serious people in the room would relax their frozen chins, soften their glaring eyes.

That’s what happened when she was with Adam. She was the first to meet Adam. He was a friend of a friend. They talked. She liked to watch him paint. When she sat with him, her presence changed that cold room full of blue into a place of freedom and solace. She’d look at the paintings, then say something that made Adam laugh. Cynical, hard Adam. He could laugh deeply, respond to almost anything she said.

“I like to have Martha around in the studio,” he told Robert once, as he chewed on his cream cheese bagel. “She changes the place.”

“Does she make that little dot of a Christ any bigger?” Robert asked, squinting again at the picture that defied his religious conception. Christ was larger than life, bigger than anything. Only Adam would paint him as an infinitesimally small dot, an atom of life on an ocean of blue.

Adam ignored Robert as only Adam knew how. He carried on painting as if Robert had never asked the question, as if Robert weren’t even there. Finally Robert left Adam’s studio, left his house. Adam didn’t even turn his head from his work, probably not even when Robert slammed Adam’s front door behind him.

Robert never told Martha what happened. But he kept thinking about Martha sitting in Adam’s studio.

He watch her picking pansies in the garden, putting them into little glazed shot glasses. He remembered what Adam had said: ‘Martha changes the place. Martha changes the place.’ What did Adam mean by that?

What did Martha say to Adam when she visited him? Clever cynical things that appealed to Adam’s negativity. Absurd humorous little things? Or maybe she just looked at him. That’s all some women had to do. That’s all Martha did when Robert first met her. She was flipping through some theological books at the Anglican Book Store. She looked up at him vaguely at first, still savouring some thought. Then she smiled at him with those warm brown eyes. She changed the place for him, all right. She changed him, thoroughly and forever.

They’d been together for several years now, but never again had she smiled at him quite as warmly, or so Robert believed. Since then he’d always felt that there was something missing. She smiled at him still, but something had changed. What had that smile lost? To answer this question he spent night after night, unraveling a large spool of thread in his brain. He’d pull the white thread into little birds nests of thread, but find no answer and no sleep.

She began to drop in on Adam more frequently on her way home from work.
It was time for Holy Communion for those who wished it. The congregation kneeled down for the confession. Robert listening to the quiet murmurings. For what we have done, and what we have left undone.

Robert again saw Martha’s pansies in the shot glass. Then he saw them scattered about the kitchen blue, a mess of purple, yellow and orange splattered here and there with the water from the glass. He’d done that, messed with those flowers, tossed the shot glass to the floor. And then he’d immediately regretted it. For what we have done. For what we have left undone. If only, then, he’d gathered up the wet flowers, then taken Martha in his arms. It was still possible then. But instead he walked out of the front door, leaving her to clean up the mess.

Robert was wakened from his thoughts by the older woman getting up for communion. Perversely, Robert suddenly felt like going up and joining in the communion line. But he hadn’t said his confession, not really. And he hadn’t paid attention during the absolution. He decided to stay put and look for Martha. She was kneeling at the communion rail, receiving the bread. Despite her sorrow, she was smiling warmly at the priest. Somehow God was helping her.

Robert swallowed hard. His saliva felt like tiny pieces of glass going down his throat.Her God helped her, but she didn’t help him. Martha could have saved him from his delusions. She should have kneeled by his armchair, like a sad-eyed Victorian heroine. She should have laid her head of long brown hair on his lap, afraid to speak. He would have stroked her hair then and known that she was all his, body and soul.

But instead, Martha left the broken pansy glass, pulled out her purse from a drawer in the kitchen, and left.

She didn’t look for him in the living room where he was waiting in his chair.
Now Robert, recalling this, only felt sad. But then he’d felt a coldness within him, even though his surface skinned burned with rage. He was like a poorly cooked microwave dinner, hot on the edges, cold at the heart. And that coldness grew. Robert didn’t move. He sat in that chair getting colder and colder. When daytime was over, Martha didn’t return, and Robert didn’t notice. He was gone.

Now he was doomed to follow her around. “Forgive me, Martha,” he whispered, across the aisle. If only she could hear. Martha was at peace with God now, after her communion. If she could only be at peace with him.

After communion, the priest asked the congregation to take some quiet time to reflect upon Robert and to pray for him. Robert looked around the church, saw the bent heads, all quiet, all thinking about him. The church was quiet, and voices from downstairs could be heard. There were women and children singing. Robert knew the song

If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands!

Robert cringed and looked around. Noone seemed to notice. Robert turned away and looked at a religious tapestry on the wall. It was a picture of Joseph and Mary on the way to Bethleham. Mary rode the donkey and wore a long flowing blue robe. Robert stared into that blue robe until the blue engulfed him. He was wading out further and further, his toes finally not touching the sand.

“Where are you?” he called out. But he could only see blue and more blue. “Christ, Christ,” he called out swimming farther and farther. “Where are you? I need you.”

Lacing the Cake

November 30

My birthday,
Grey Cup Sunday
Family Deadline:
Christmas cakes

A light and a dark
Sliced cleanly
Invitingly
On an oval china plate
At family gatherings

My cake?
Made after the deadline
Laced with Jim Bean
Red and White Label
Ran out of Brandy
Crumbly, Messy
Drunken
Wrapped hastily
In cheesecloth and foil
Still yummy, rich, decadent -

It’s Christmas