For Sherman Hay

 

 for my father

https://shermanhay.format.com/

 

 

 

 

 

To come into the awareness of the gift given

to again     be open to receive what might unfold

find and enter the art

to give back out of myself

 

            yours and this      particular self’s art

 

 

 

To find means to keep living our shared world

to live ascending

 

            to you and this

 

 

 

To delight in that in which you delighted

to recount

what you opened for me

 

            these     bright directions

 

 

 

Again finding you where no one else would find you

still hearing your voice in our house, yes

but also anywhere else I come to find myself

To be marked by your loss is

to live between here and your place

 

 

 

I who have known you, in a relation only our own

you who founded me

you whose only remaining body is locked away in my mind

setting myself to this work, to find you in your past, my past, my present

                                                                                                            bear memory

seemingly against life to bring you into my presence again

against death, amongst earth

if I am disciplined enough to carry you                          

if not, what of a lost life can I bear forth?

 

I would take you up in my arms, what you have given me in your being with me,

so that you might transform me              in ways I could not be transformed during your life

so that I might take in, might yield late      what you have given me

 

living downstream from you,     from all you shared in time near or remote from me

            to all you brought forth in my life,          still receiving from you             

floods in fluctuation

 

 

at your final home of 15 years, among your sculpture garden, your art, your trace

in the season of your death,

driving up from the city that morning after you died in the house, almond blossoms pink-whitened the valley

then the foothills enveloped in green grass light

 

now always returning to your garden, always work needed

now wearing your old straw hat

 

pooling surfaces of crystal grain

the climb twist warp of stone and grape,

                   so also the wrap of color and shape in your painted ceramics

having dealt in stone’s motion

there breathes the lure in this or that fold between stones

accumulated in the rippling flood of the rock down our hill

 

searching again for a vocabulary for the structuring and momentum of those rocks

finding always new shape among your design

always more from you

                                                from the newness of again being here today with you

                                                                               

The mark of an energetic body  

and the maintenance of that mark by those who care for you still

whose life is enriched by your presencing there again

 

renewing the work of you preceding me,

of opening to what you saw and made of that seeing

 

you whose death’s slow unfolding in me                       

as I slow folding in         what is yours

which is so much of what glitters of my world

 

 

I live on after you

carrying you                 impossibly

what can be thought      over your death and absence

 

and plod beyond your ashes and utter your name to the living

the world amidst which I still live,

changing me in ways you will never see

 

 

 

Not content with only holding you as an object of memory

rather to reconstruct you in myself

search in my own skin for your presence

for your power overlapping in me in which my insight is also yours

for us to alight here

 

you left me with the signs:

your artworks portals asking of me,        which I too ask

            and what words to speak for what your work might not communicate?

                        what communion will not be there for others?

                        what can I offer?

 

Finding my way to you with whatever I can glean from the day’s study

 

finding ways to be changed by you anew