soulsearching

April cruel? No. fleeting, the end is the beginning.
The early bloomers are dispatched by the sudden shower and the accompanying wind.
The redbuds reign as they gain a purple violet hue
and frame the dogwoods as they emerge.
Just sitting in the warming sun is delightful.
Soon the weeds and multiflora will have the upper hand.
Already the garlic mustard is taking over.

Why am I searching for lost loves?
Is it my lost selves I am searching for?
Do I still see myself in others and others in me?
I used to be a prophet of possibility.
By the nineties we will have gained a loving new world
that we helped create. It is now 2006 and the world is teetering.

What will I find if I recover my lost loves?
What do I mean by loves?
I am not searching for old lovers.
I am looking to recover what is beyond the corporeal.
Some misplaced essence, or conviction.

It is not the almost mystic happening
I almost experienced half asleep in the chapel
as the sun shone through the stained glass window.
It is not making love down by the creek
as a swarm of bees darkenened the sunlight.

It is not the butterfly resting on my sweaty belly
as I pause from moving rocks away from the bank
and sit on a folding chair in the creek.

Nor is it seeing my thirdborn son
minutes after he is born still bloody.

It is not that moment when my new daughter sits
in the full moonlight and makes artificial sounds of water falling
her frightened face uplifted on the verge of tears.
Was she remembering a time in the orphanage
when she was punished for failing to pee
after awakening a grouchy attendant.

Nor was it my Tom Sawyer son conning others
on the stage to whitewash the picket fence.

I began to know what love is from the inside
when my wife came home from the hospital
stomach embroidered in a new way
after they cut the cancer out
and I could let her know how beautiful she was
and how I loved her.

Was it the moment I was sitting in a chair after a walk in the fields
and my hip hurt and the white cat ,honky, jumped into my lap
and jumped right off, eyes wild ,hair high
and I jumped up as well and limped away like my mother used to
feeling my mother in me departing
now finally leaving this earth
a year's turning after she died on my birthday.

It is all of these and other ordinary encounters at work
or in bars listening to jazz with Phebe.
It is walking down to drop and add with a fistful of slips
I have signed and skirting the lines to find
Mrs Murphy to accept these changes.

It was hidden moments behind closed doors in the smokefilled board room
where I was brazen enough to raise questions
and challenge new directions by new leaders.

And a thousand other moments when I said no
because I could ,or yes
or whenI let someone pause a minute
to find their way again
A temporary safe harbor.

It was also times when I was shunned
because people believed what they wanted to about me
only to find out differently down the line.

It was also the time I walked out of the Catholic Church
in Mtown one final time and walked across the street to the Baptist Church
where I read and Death shall have no dominion
from the choir loft on Easter morning.

It was coming face to face with with human failure:
The Baptist minister and the young deaconess
and what was really happening at The Paris Peace talks
It was meeting an exhausted Saul Alinsky in his last year
at our Conference on Community Organization.
It was seeing a tired Paulo Freire on a Sunday morning at Penn
in a room still littered with pocorn and debris from a movie the night before.

It was all those Summers at Bucknell with Ernie
and learning with the STEP students.
It is all those things and more.