ECOLOGY

in the solitude of sabbatical retreat

in York Harbour on the Atlantic cusp,

I am learning to hear the heart’s light

lyrically borne on titanium filaments,

strong and resilient, beyond breaking

I live without a clock, in the heart’s time,

no longer a crone’s gigolo beating

to the incessant whine of chronos

measured precisely like cement blocks

instead of rushing from task to task,

without end or satisfaction, compelling

my body to catch up when it can,

I now move slowly, feel my feet,

grounded, taste the heart’s rhythm

in my old life, I had little time for grief

or prayer, God lost in the frantic crowd,

but now I hold others in the heart’s space,

in the quiet time of imagination’s bounty

in the still silence of York Harbour

like a monastery in moonlight on the edge

of the snowlight sea, I hold friends located

on lines of latitude throughout the earth,

friends with hearts, both swollen and splintered

in the half dozen months I have dwelled

here, one friend has died with cancer,

another has received the dread news,

two more are regaining health after cancer

I hold each one in the sunlight of winter time

and others, too, who are finding middle age

a dark forest where they are lost and will

not be found like my pastor who no longer

knows God, claims God no longer knows him

I hold each one in winter light like Clive

who taught me Wittgenstein while I taught him

the basics of teaching grade 9’s the novel,

whose heart stopped in Japan, my age, now gone

in today’s e-mail I learned that Bill died

in his sleep (could Bill have stayed up all night

and beat death like a Stephen King novel?)

and I recall how Bill sat on the rock outside PonF

with a tender smile for everyone hurrying by

if I can believe in an invisible net of worldwide

interconnections in cyberspace, surely I can

believe in the ecology of words and lines of care

borne lightly in the heart, even the unbearable

I will hold my friends through the blustery

winds of winter into the promises of spring

as I know they will hold me, in blood-beating

heart and imagination and memory beyond

all counting of tense time, in tenderness only