September 16: Love, Philip Levine, "Ascension"

If you can't tell from my last few posts, I'm a little preoccupied with the idea of time and love and growing up and growing old right now.  Weddings do that to me.  It's all that hope and joy fermenting in one day.  Like a flower bulb that, after two or three or four years of being dormant in the soil, suddenly blossoms toward the sun.

Of course, it's not all roses and champagne.  Marriage is difficult.  Love is difficult.  Anything that's precious requires work.  It's like when I was learning how to braid my daughter's hair when she was little.  I would sit with her in my lap and braid and unbraid and braid again.  I wanted her to be beautiful and perfect.

I have a poem tonight from Phil Levine that is about love in a way.  It's about the culmination of an entire life, all the hard work that goes into something precious, something blessed, something holy.

Saint Marty knows about that kind of work.

Ascension

by:  Philip Levine

Now I see the stars
are ready for me
and the light falls upon
my shoulders evenly,
so little light that even
the night birds can't see
me robed in black flame.
I am alone, rising
through clouds and the lights
of distant cities until
the earth turns its darker
side away, and I am ready
to meet my guardians
or speak again the first words
born in time.  Instead,
it is like that dream
in which a friend leaves
and you wait, parked
by the side of the road
that leads home, until
you can feel your skin
wrinkling and your hair
grown long and tangling
in the winds, and still you
wait because you've waited
so long.  Below, the earth
has turned to light but,
unlike the storied good
in Paradise, I see no going
and coming, none of the pain
I would have suffered had I
merely lived.  At first
I can remember my wife,
the immense depth of her eyes
and her smooth brow in morning
light, the long lithe body
moving about her garden
day after day, at ease in the light
of those brutal summers.  I can
see my youngest son again
moving with the slight swagger
of the carpenter hitching
up his belt of tools.  I
can even remember the feel
of certain old shirts
against my back and shoulders
and how my arms ached
after a day of work.  Then I
forget exhaustion, I forget
love, forget the need to
be a man, the need to
speak the truth, to close
my eyes and talk to someone
distant but surely listening.
Then I forget my own trees
at evening moving in the day's
last heat like the children
of the wind, I forget the hunger
for food, for belief, for love,
I forget the fear of death,
the fear of living forever,
I forget my brother, my name,
my own life.  I have risen.
Somewhere I am a god.
Somewhere I am a holy
object.  Somewhere I am.

It's hard work, but it's worth it