In 2006 I had several people close to me die. The following poems were written during the transition and death of my mentor Stevan, who worked with me installing beautiful gardens. He fell ill suddenly and died a month later. Stevan trained his Guatemalan crew to serve and care for gardens with an artistic eye–better than any crew I’d ever worked with. His death was a great blow to me and I was quite shaken by the series of losses I had that year. It was only through coming to Sunlight Basin, my then new home in Wyoming, for several months in the fall that I felt my heart finally healing. Stevan had a gift for recognizing others’ inherent talents and nurturing them. While working with Stevan for over five years, I came into my own as a designer. I also learned what a ‘mentor’ truly is. Even now, sometimes when I am placing boulders or working on certain kinds of design problems on site, I hear his words inside my heart guiding me.
The Heart is True Life
Death is the servant of the moment
that comes to shake you up.
To ask the question: ‘How well have you loved?’
I detour to the nursery to buy some plant food
and
there’s Karen.
She asked about you.
“Have you been working with Stevan?”
I told her the news.
“He’s a human being” she says
as I rush to pay and get back to the crew.
I’m sorting through garden flats when
the phone rings. In a moment the day that ran like a train
slows to molasses.
I’ve been waiting for you to tell the guys, but your moments are compressing into tiny spaces so
I must tell them now.
It is raining a surreal rain.
Vito is crying,
I hug him like my son and feel his conflict inside.
“Vito, you must tell the others. My Spanish can not accommodate these feelings.”
And Time speeds up for Vito
as he grows from boy to man before me.
We wash the mud from our boots and
pile into two trucks.
Tantas preguntas vienen en mi direccion.
My Spanish dished out like left-overs
in a garble of explanations
on the way to the hospital.
Nine of us
Eight Guatemalan men and one white woman
still dark with earth and soil
push open the double doors into the
Perfect, white, sterile, world of the ICU.
“please wait here” “Just two at a time”
I walk in.
You’ve just been told
you have only months to live.
We see each other
I take your hand, so soft, so weak.
You cry a little.
I am careful to avoid the river of tubes and the metal jungle around us.
Every part of you appears organized by technology except
The part I’ve always known.
Your voice comes from a deeper place than we’ve shared before:
“It is sad, but I have learned a lot.”
I whisper “What have you learned?”
“So much from all of you.”
We are all quivering with the emotion of the moment.
The faucet of time slows, drop-by-drop,
And the three of us fall into Love.
All Juan Carlos and I have to tell you
is how much you’ve given us, how much you live within us.
All you have to tell us is take care of ourselves and remember the beauty that surrounds us.
Juan Carlos is kneeling.
A nurse brings in a chair.
He takes your hand but continues to kneel.
His other hand is on his heart.
There is only one breath
filling the room,
that makes us shiver together.
Death is not what I thought it was.
When I saw you lying there, Death slapped me in the face,
Woke me out of my desire dreams, and
Pointed me in the omnidirectional.
There is no lacking here, no need unfulfilled, never has been.
What is speechless stood on stage
and the audience was gratitude.
Now I know:
All I have loved I have never lost.
Your last moments With me
I imagine
A crack
In the Universe
And you slipping through,
quietly, silently.
I thought you weren’t here because I see
Every breath is a burden for you.
I held your hand hard,
But, I thought,
‘You are no longer here.
You must be swimming through a perforation
In the fabric of time.’
I imagine.
What to feel? What to think?
TV’s blasting,
The red faced bald man is smoking, opening and closing the sliding door, he nods a hello.
The ashen wheelchair-bound man stares at the mute TV, expressionless,
Glancing at me
Between deep pauses in my mind.
The most tender moment in a lifetime
And we are making love in a bar.
My heart is clenching.
My chest is aching.
You are gasping. Your fever is running.
The oxygen machine rumbles my chair like a wild ride.
I try to feel
This moment
But I am only a confused mass of wonderment and anguish.
It must be time to go
Because I have become so uncomfortable.
I am caught between Infinity and the incessant noise of humanity.
I lean over
And whisper in your ear
“Goodbye Stevan. You can let go.”
You softly moan.
“I love you Stevan.”
And you groan again.
Somewhere
You are still there.
Coming back through that tear
To touch my heart.
“I love you a lot.” I say it once more only so
I can hear you for the last time
moan to me.
We are all only emotional beings.
I know that, for as I walk out into the cold night air
my heart unclenches in a river of tears,
Unmasking the moment.
Only a shiver
Separates me from
You
Wandering through that fissure.
