It started
in the same way it always starts: the
end of the bad day at school. It began
with a bad day at school and my funeral pants.
I chose to wear the fucking funeral pants. I knew I shouldn’t. I wasn’t going to but I had to test it. I wore those pants to the funeral for D and for C and for R. All kids. All beloved and missed. Would that energy follow me? Oh, it did and it turned out to be a day so
bad I had to run away to the forest at dusk when I got home.
So, awash
with burden and anger and frustration, suffering from PTSD in the chill and
wind and rain; feeling the grief again and ashamed that after nearly five years
all that shit still felt fresh – as fresh as it did five years ago – I ran away
to the forest in the lingering dark.
It was
beautiful for my mood. It was dreary and
rainy and chilly. I started my loop from
the top of the hill near the condos. It
was perfect poetry weather. Perfect. I
scrolled through my music, before I got out into the rain, and my eyes fell on
Leonard Cohen. I immediately tapped his
name. I hadn’t properly had some time
with him since his passing and Dylan had just sent me a picture of his flower
laden stoop the night before.
Perfect. Now was the time.
I pushed
play, cowled myself with my rain hood, pulled my scarf up to my nose and
stepped into the rain. The opening lines
of Suzanne purred into my skull and
my whole body filled with warmth. Deep,
reverberating sadness, too. I felt the
poetry of the moment in the deepening dusk and the wind and the rain – in the
naked trees shattering the skyline in the deepening dark – and my aching
heart. The tears slowly started to come,
one at a time, and mix with the rain droplets on my face. By the time I got to the back field it was
all but dark.
And then the
three-quarter time, waterfall waltz swirled around me and, for the first time I
heard: O, the sisters of mercy they are
not departed or gone, they were waiting for me when I thought that I just can’t
go on. I settled into the heaviness
then, surrendered to it and let it come upon me in the fullness of its weight
in the ever deepening dark. By the time
I got to the back field, it was all but dark.
There was enough light for me to see the ground so I didn’t slip and
fall in the squelchy spots where the path was muddiest. I constantly had to renegotiate my footing on
grass as he sang his goodbyes first to the woman with the hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm and then to
Marriane and it didn’t occur to me until the next morning, as I wrote my pages
by candle light of the early black morning, that I had lost my footing – was losing
my footing – with my neediest group at school because I believed I didn’t
really have it in me to fall in love with them as I have in the past…but let’s not talk of love or chains or
things we can’t untie…
The deeper I
walked into the darkness of the falling sky, I realised I couldn’t care
anymore. I felt that I was too afraid and too tired. I was haunted by the notion that I had chosen
to wear my funeral pants because my other pants were too tight and I didn’t
feel like enduring the indignity of denim squeezing self-esteem over the waist
band of my jeans.
I just knew
something bad was going to happen when I put on those pants. Maybe that thought – that energy – poisoned my
day. I thought about that, too, as I
approached the graveyard parallel to the path I walk. By now Famous
Blue Raincoat played and my whole body filled with heaviness. I felt every chill and just wanted to sit and
listen to Cohen sing my hurts and frustrations and hopelessness away. I wanted to sit on a bench and look out into
the valley, with its golden yard lights on weeping farms, and dream of days in
my childhood when I would look for city lights, or stars, at the darkest part
of night, before I knew the Northern Lights.
The day had
started so beautifully with a gorgeous pink sunrise and a vivid rainbow in the
west when I was on my way to drop Dante off at school before my meeting. I remembered none of those things trudging,
wet and cold, up the hill back to the car to The Chelsea Hotel filling my head.
Then it hit
me. Leonard Cohen is dead. This God among poets is dead and only people
like me have been left behind to carry on what he started.
The last
thought made my breath catch…a hiccup almost…of sheer panic; complete terror or
maybe shame. And just under the murmur
of The Guests came the realisation
that I would never be able to write anything as good as Cohen. Ever.
I had to sit
down. I perched myself on a metal bench
and looked out into the dark valley at the headlights creeping over the Mission
bridge – the caterpillar of light – and kept feeling that realisation over and
over and over, deeper into my body. Hallelujah
started and confirmed the thought.
I just wept
there on that cold bench, for the world without poetry and wondered how we
would ever survive it…clenching your fist
for the ones like us who are oppressed by the figures of beauty…well never
mind, we are ugly but we have the music.
I went back
to the car and wept some more for the dead philosopher poet and my aching heart
for the boys I could not love so I could survive in a job that daily does its
level best to kill me. And I tried to
write a poem about the burden of stepping in the footprint of the giants,
knowing that his shoes will never be filled because I go barefoot:
In this November dark,
by Cohen, I try to find the same paths which comfort by day.
Now in dusk, whispers away from darkness,
there is a privacy in my hood to weep for the world and my tired heart
burdened by the weight of the job to take up the torch of word and song...
To continue the reverberations of Hallelujah in the tower of song and the weight of it all buckles my knees...
blinded by the mascara in my eyes...
wishing for a pen instead of a glowing slab of plastic
to do him justice.
It's too heavy a burden and I am terrified I will never write a decent piece again -
Nothing will ever be as transcendent as his.
Ever.
While he lived all possibilities were available
but now it's over and too heavy...too much.
There is nothing left in me now.
Love is not enough...and I cannot reach it any more...
the burden of the word is too heavy now.
I have no Suzanne or Marianne and this waltz trips me up now on my grey words.
Maybe I'll feel stronger soon but right now,
in this dark November rain, it is all too heavy to bear.
R. L. Elke
Nov. 22/16
I got home
and tried to connect with my husband and son over dinner but just couldn’t do
that. I went to bed to write…then a dear
old friend texted me to let me know that a friend of ours from our school days
had passed and we missed the funeral. He
had suffered from depression for a long time but was doing well, according to
the herald of the news. She had been in contact with him recently – more recent
than my correspondence with him over a year ago.
I remembered
his impish grin and his wavy brown hair and how was always saying pervy shit –
but it was funny…one by one the guests
arrive, the guests are coming through.
The open-hearted many, the broken-hearted few…And I realised that we
were the losers – the herald, her brother, the deceased, and me – always on the
outside looking in at the “cool kids.” I
didn’t know that then. They were just my
friends – the first people to embrace me on my arrival to my millionth
school. I spent the most time with those
kids – more time than anywhere in my life to that point. We were the losers and one of us felt that
burden into adulthood…we all felt that burden but one of us couldn’t reconcile
it and free it…it became so heavy for him that the burden was too heavy for him
to bear.
I made
several attempts to write poems to capture that walk and the weight of the
realisation of my inadequacy to become a mentor of the next generation of
poets, and it just became too much. I
turned off my light, after closing my book and putting the pen in its
spine. I turned off my light and wept to
The Guests and The Song of Burnadette – which kills me everytime – and I Came So Far For Beauty.
I wept for
poetry, and my career, and for Dusty – sweet, strange Dusty – who felt so
lonely and other that he needed to leave.
One by one, the guests arrive,
The guests are coming through,
The open-hearted many
The broken-hearted few…
And those who dance, begin to dance
Those who weep begin
And “welcome, welcome” cries a voice
“Let all my guests come in.”
Never. My bare feet are too tiny to fill these
shoes. Nov. 23/16
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