Ashes

Perhaps it is meaningful that Fat Tuesday is also SuperDuper Tuesday. After the feasting come the ashes, if you go in for that sort of thing. (Even if you don't, they will come.)

Some years ago when I was the on-call chaplain for St. Luke's Hospital in Manhattan, I went into the wards on Ash Wednesday to put ashes on foreheads and remind people they were going to die. There was great eagerness among the nurses in particular, who were positively gleeful as they lined up. I recall that as I was imposing ashes on the nurses in the Intensive Care Unit a man in the room nearby went into cardiac arrest. The doctors rushed in to save his life. I am not sure exactly what they were doing; I was busy marking the smiling nurses with death. I had not gotten to him yet.

This brief recollection is just a prelude to a poem, which I wrote a few weeks ago, not thinking about Lent at all. It is not a poem about Lent, but it is about ashes. As the poem says, that is enough.

Ashes


Scatter them you said
on the Columbia where Multnomah Falls
bisects the cliff’s face
knife plunged through the rock
a flash of brilliance in the sun
so that they sink into the everlasting flow of things
dissolve into memory
into fact
into the western sun
what I want you said is to leave the country
lose myself in the Pacific

it was one of those conversations
we did not plan to have
how do you want to be memorialized
I asked
when you’re gone
what songs should we sing
and what do we do with the body
you no longer need
and we are too creeped out to keep

burn it you said

and I agreed
I do not want to be deposited in dirt
I said
nor in the family vault
burn mine too
and you and all my friends
be joyful on a hill
among the spruce and rock
and if you cannot bear to watch
the flames consume me
recall the heat of all the passions
of our days and feel within
the unexpected power of
what bursts forth when we let go
of what we were

you smiled and said ok
we’ll dance for you like dervishes
but if I’m gone before you
just be sure you dump
my ashes in the river
that’s enough