John Clarke   [Untitled] I Straining to be retold precisely in each other's words and eyes. The ache for a past tale is caked on our temples. He once the slim, the dark young father. I then the light round boy. But now it is: "I thought I had a son once" "And so you do now, whose father is stone-blind to him" Mistellings press each other out to an edge of the womb scream parlored back beyond the shouts that chalk the summer night. Each second's space of desperate rejoinder--- as we grope and twinge to touch at love--- only chokes anew at the years' bruised gaping. My blood, his blood, ticks off the seed's time, the slipping tide that strands bad fruit. We age and bear it badly. Ripening to love early rots too soon. II Years later, through my slim youth's stage and round again, I rode up to your funeral, knowing grief as my body now. Too ill to get to your deathside in time, now I saw you laid out Irish (Spanish? Hebrew?) at the wake. Then walked to the altar, and stood and read or rasped aloud at Mass the allotted verses– all flesh is grass–while all along I argued to myself "But what grass!" - splendid wrinkled radiance, watered on earth and air to fire. We'd always told each other, somehow, I hoped, the love was there, amid all bitters. Still, there'd been no time to tell now– just an ache, and maybe the gift of that old rhythm&blues "Daddy's Home" . . . "Daddy's home to stay. . . ." turning up on the car radio on the way up, while Donna drove and not yet five Sean consoled from the back seat as I sat numb. Even more years later, driving up alone for a quick family reunion after more deaths in between, – hear it come again!–that old r&b tune, somewhere along the road Ñ confirming all I'll ever know or need outside of dreams, – no love is ever always lost– find it early, late it stays . . . [Untitled] "Yes, individual creatures die, but that doesn't end the story of the world. The whole earth, all the stars, all the planets, all the comets represent within them one divine history, one source of life, one endless and wondrous story that only God knows in its entirety. . . . "Lovely and pleasant in their lives And in their Death They were not divided" --I.B. Singer A friend suggests it and suddenly your teenage son is five again and leading you by the hand down into not Calvary this time but St. John's Cemetery in Queens and even though they're running out of spaces and have to leave many above ground now while waiting for more holes to be dug you both enter the ground descending through a clean mud tunnel flecked with grass into the unmarked grave where Mom and Dad are said to rest. The boy's already comforted you once by referring you to passages at the end of I.B. Singer's tale of Nafthali the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus, with their lovely epitaph, when he was really five. Now he leads you bravely up to the bones and all the rest and you hear your mother's voice, with your father humming in the background, say "We're not here now, you'll find us elsewhere." And then you wake up. A young girl stands by your side. PRAYER RUG And we are put on earth a little space That we may learn to bear the beams of love --William Blake Time that warps us out of shape wefts us too into a texture of communion whose pattern we barely see or suspect --- gazing as we do, pre-toddling, belly-whomping rug-rats amid the pile of carpet's splendor, the very gardens, waterfalls, within. If we crawl as children --- let it be our joy. Discover in our cracked plastic hamster's sphere invisible silent ever prayer. Hold us each by each. A LATE MOTHER'S DAY Holding a hand that held you before it slips into the dark - that was all you could do for each other - it must be enough.   John Clarke is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist. He works as a legislative analyst in the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress, and lives in Montgomery County, Maryland. For the past several years, he's led a noontime poem-story-meditation group for LC employees and others, and maintains an e-mail list for poetry and other quotes and event notices. He's interested in connecting poetry, healing, learning, and community peace and justice work. Published in Volume 1, Number 4, Fall 2000.   To read more by this author: John Clarke: The Whitman Issue