March 29: "The Visit," Good Friday, Dead and Living

Billy Collins welcomes a guest . . .

The Visit

by:  Billy Collins

The wind blew

open the front door

and sat down

in my father's chair.

It is Good Friday, and I've hardly written anything this whole Lenten season  I had big intentions to write a new poem every day, from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, this year.  But, the best laid plans of mice and poets . . . 

So, here I sit at a Subaru dealership, scribbling in my journal while my car gets an oil change and tire rotation, and I have only one or two terrible drafts of Lenten poems under my belt, feeling guilty, which is an appropriate emotion, I suppose, for this particular day of the Christian calendar.

I find myself kind of . . . haunted this morning.  The wind has kicked open the front door and plopped down on the couch beside me, metaphorically speaking.  The wind looks a lot like my mother.

You see, my mom was the person who brought me into the life of a church musician when I was about 17 years old.  Holy Week was always a marathon of Masses and music, my mother selecting the hymns, telling me when to show up at church.  Me, being a dutiful son, always followed her directions.  Thus, the Triduum resurrects my mother for me.  For the next three days, I feel her close by, hear her shadow soprano when I play, see her shadow form in the corners of the choir loft.

Right beside my mother is an army of ghosts.  My dead.  They gather beneath the arms of "The Old Rugged Cross," standing there (do ghosts stand?) as the pipe organ sighs and hums and booms.  My dad.  Two sisters.  A brother.  A passel of friends.  They sing and leap, dance and cry.  Crowd around me, waiting to hear favorite songs in their spectral ears (do ghosts have ears?).

Saint Marty can hear the stones rolling away, graves emptying, the dead and the living crowded in the kitchen, waiting for ham sandwiches, colored eggs, and baskets of chocolate.