[In June, I started working part time at a Funeral Home. One of my tasks was to arrange all the cremated remains that have been left behind over time. It was baffling. Over 500 since the 1950s. I wrote this poem shortly after a long shift working in the Home.]

I’m standing in a mass grave.

Not one dug in the dubious cloak of night by the shovel of a tyrant.

A grave that is tucked away in the fluorescent catacombs of a funeral home.

I have been appointed to order these lonely parcels into chronological and alphabetical order—due diligence to finally put them into the ground en masse.

Shelf after shelf of neatly packaged cremated human remains—boxes just wide enough to grasp with one hand, but too heavy to carry for long.

I pick up one that feels empty and quickly realize that the box contains the remains of a baby.

There are many babies.

Weathered masking tape holds serial numbers that verify an identity, some with instructions—

Nephew will pick up. Brother in Germany. Hold for six months. Will pick up on April 11. Call family.

Most have names: Maude, Clive, Edna, Dorothy, Daisy, Stan, Bertha.

Some do not have names—Unidentified male, Vancouver. Unidentified Male, Burnaby. Unidentified Male, New Westminster.

This cubical congregation spans many decades—1955, 1958, 1972, 1978, 1986, 1998, 2004.

A weathered box from the 1970s leaks gritty ash from a corner,

It piles like an hour glass on an empty pine coffin I am using as a workstation.

Ash like any ash, dust like any dust;

And yet, attach a name and a big bang of images, ideas and personality expand outward like a tiny universe.

I tape the box shut and put it in its new niche.

Silver fish swim among the disintegrating brown paper and masking taped cardboard coffins.

I scratch my arm and dead skin cells slough off, a slow cremation.

I breath in the trace dust of 500 lives lived and cough them out again.

I want to take them all home and adopt them as my own ancestors and friends.

Build them cathedrals and mausoleums.

Make biopics about their lives, extraordinary and ordinary alike.

Write biographies that will scandalize, or end up in free bins in the foyers of public libraries.

But my arms give out,

A fuse mysteriously blows,

I leave the boxes where they lay for another night alone together.

The soft patter of cool drops,

Christen forehead, neck and hands.

The earthy incense of the desert’s thirsty breath

As He opens his sandy mouth to drink.

Processions of Palo Verde and Mesquite still clad in their golden Easter vestments

Shout Alleluia! from the valley’s hillsides

And throw their spent petals into the Pentecostal winds.

Even the cacti are clad in their Sunday best.

Like my own spiny succulent heart—

Prickly and defensive most of the time

With seasons of extravagant

Openness and beauty.

April 29, 2019

At the bottom of steep steps

that lead to the edge of an ocean

between a sandy cliff and the lapping tide

I see a red eye gleaming among the logs and silent stones

–silent until the tide teaches them to speak.

The eye belongs to a small bird we call Grebe

in drab plumage he struggles out of the sea he knows so well.

Still now below a beached and weathered log

silent, awkward and alone

on the cobbled clacking shore.

The shore of incessant

syncopated

chatter

between sea and stone.

Two of my kind walk by

Without noticing

the Grebe in drab plumage.

I move closer

an arm’s length away.

I look into that fierce red eye

and watch as his back

rises and falls

in short resigned breaths.

There is broken flesh below his wing

I am too timid to touch him

to carry him away

perhaps my touch would only make things worse.

I watch the water that is

endlessly rising and receding

chattering with rocks that do not care

If they live or die

because they will always be

alive in the tiny flecks of body

that make up plankton

and shell fish

and seals

and herring

and clams

and eagles

and uncertain men’s hands

and Grebes’ red eyes.

This grebe, on the edge

of the ocean he knows so well

an ocean that incessantly

speaks with the rocks

beneath his wounded wings

stares at the coming fog of that dark ocean

a death he may not fully grasp

and I sit stone still at the edge of the world

and look at these hands

and wait.

Redemption comes in tiny ripples, not crashing waves.

Redemption arrives quietly like swallows—one or two appear overnight and stay on for a time.

Redemption comes in an instant like the sparkle of grains of sand that catch the sun just right.

Redemption works on a person like the tides.

What begins as the sharp edges of broken glass-hearts, yield their violence to the slow washing over of the ever breathing sea.

Redemption comes like clouds of pollen from sturdy pines that somehow find the nakedness of fertile cones.

And, once acknowledged in the heart, redemption, ever present, becomes a ripened seed that plunges into the fecund darkness of earth with an unwavering hope that she too will become a towering tree.