everything passes
On New Year’s Eve day, after I fed the wood stove
with pages from last year’s paper calendar,
after reading past entries from January through December
and feeling a weightlessness in them like a butterfly on my shoulder,
after readying a new calendar much like the old one,
filling in birthdays and deathdays through spring equinox
and deciding that was as far as I wanted to imagine
and that this year I would write in pencil,
the ink scratch-throughs and squiggles and arrows of last year a lesson I had learned,
I set out to create a gift for a man who is dying and his beloved wife, both dear friends.
I tore paper made by Buddhist nuns into small cloud shapes
and wrote “everything passes”on each one — in Hebrew, in French,
in Basque, in Filipino, in Welch,
in English, in Yoruba, in Hindi.
I threaded the paper puffs through a single length of twine
and added a loop to the top so the mobile could dangle
from a tree branch to pass through time.
A mind that is set is a mind that is sure to be disappointed.
So last night, when my oldest dog woke me at 11:33
with her I need to go outside whimper,
I pulled on my robe and thanked her for getting me up near midnight.
She sped straight to a nearby pile of wet leaves,
leaving me to look up at the stars, hidden by long days of rain,
that now netted the bare branches of oaks
whose leaves released over months in waves of letting go.
To everything there is a season
and a time to every purpose under heaven,
Ecclesiastes and The Byrds.
I realized one fine day when the sun brightened my intention
and enlarged the divine that I had discovered in me,
that I could write God’s Word in my own language,
siphoned through the conduit of my life.
I found solace and strength in owning for myself
the so-called truth of the ages.
So I consider today a threshold, an entry point, a portal,
with a wisdom that I have lived through
and that lives through me.
Everything passes.
I praise that.
