Exhaling

In case you missed it (as I almost did), tess said:

I do wish this were a forum where we could see instantly new posts rather than look through the comments in case we miss things, but that’s just a wish.
A Marist priest, Fr. Dubay, clothed you! Fascinating.
I’m writing because you mentioned the brush with death. Now that’s interesting since this has happened to me as well. Might I ask what happened to you?

I wish I could keep up with the comments more closely as well. But I’m not ready to move to anything more involved than this just yet. I am a bit techno-challenged.

Meanwhile, to your comments, Tess. Yes, Fr. Dubay happened to be giving a week-long retreat at the Carmelite Monastery that is home to our Secular Order chapter, and he was the priest who presided over our meeting and gave me my scapular. That was a wonderful surprise.

To answer your question, as is true of every “near-death” experience, the whole story is long and punctuated with beautiful moments of grace – from the doctor in charge to the emergency staff called in to help and everyone in between. It is a story I would like to tell in detail some day. For now, I will let the poem speak for itself, except to let you know that what happened was not uncommon: after the delivery of my last child, I hemmorhaged and needed emergency surgery, and that this was actually the second time I had almost died.

To Sing You Must Exhale
Cantus planus, bis

Life drains ferociously –
a cyclonic crimson torrent
and a rolling thunderhead of daguerreotype
I trace through the ceiling tiles.
I’ve seen this on sepia film –
a woman, damp with the fatigue of birthing,
every fiber relieved of a robust newling,
fading adagio in an oversized bed.
But here, the wan smile unacknowledged
as sterile strangers swarm
this well-worn instrument,
puncture what is left of a fading shell,
assure loudly in the direction of these
cooling wax pools
and then in
silent prejudicial prognoses
deliver the death sentence in glances and nods.
I know what I do not know,
refulgent galaxies churning to life in my skull,
I count my breaths and
mark the measure.
Danse macabre –
my steady, sturdy heart,
so recently quickening another waxing soul,
has lost its step and,
gulping for oxygen like a frantic trapped fish
deranged by the sunlight, it wildly clamors
to be free of this cage.
Erratic pirouette of ambivalence
to the deep whisper of luminous music
rising within me –
a music like the brilliant evaporation of dust
burning from
a falling
star.
I focus on the rhythm but
cannot will my hummingbird heart to
register a metered throb.
I waver – the dilettante’s toddle on that
high and
narrow beam
between
fervidly grasping
gristle and gravel,
currency and crumbs,
stone and the syllables I know, or
surrendering outrageously,
scandalously,
to the ineluctable promise of what
ear has not heard,
never before having been given the choice.
An impossibly delicate web holds me here
but I do not trust its strength
or theirs
or yours…
still, trust is all I am now –
trust and a lightning rod.
I breath in – Oh Jesus
I exhale – I am Yours.

Silence.

I awake, bewildered, to a new cadence,
my heart’s rhythm found,
all of me an unbearable weight,
plastic propping my jugular, portal for
a stranger’s life-gift,
a hasty row of threads holding me together
where my children once ripened,
your familiar hand,
warm with the mundane flush of
uninterrupted pulse,
draws me from where I dreamed I’d be.
Medical miracle of the month.
I ache to reassure you,
but how can I make you understand
peace at the brink?
I cannot make you know
the awkward unripe rhythm of our song or
the subtle oppressions of gravity
until you’ve felt eternity begin to fill
the lungs of your soul
and glimpsed the source of quarks and nervus rerum
which frees us of sinews and air and
transforms us
into ceaseless and ever-changing harmonies of
effulgence.
I know what I do not know and
I’ve leaned face-first into
the most fragile membrane and
balanced, breathless, on that stropped razor edge
which separates us from all we are meant to be.
And still my nostrils recall that new bright air
and still this heart of clay dances to an
unperceived chord, the whole
redeemable burden of me
longing to pierce infinity at last.

All the things we’re doing and
running from and cataloging and
all we hold in our fists
the equivalent of
dominoes in the dark or
a symphony without strings
once you confess that your
neat rows
cast no shadows.
And you cannot read the score
and you cannot really sing
until finally you

exhale

and know the incomprehensible
freedom of Truth.

Cantare amantis est.
~St Augustine

This one is the title poem from the poetry book .