S O M E N O T E S Y O U H O L D

About

Some Notes You Hold

$16.95

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Some Notes You Hold: New and Selected Poems is about surviving what life throws at us as we age. The so-called “golden years” are so named because of the high admission price—the tremendous losses, disappointments, illnesses, and failures we all experience if we live long enough. The first part of the book, called “Letting Go,” focuses on surviving deep grief. The middle section is a musical interlude, exploring the tremendous power of music to heal us mentally, physically, and spiritually and to reorder our thinking and our emotions. The last section, “Holding On,” explores the roads leading to survival: prayer and meditation, communion with the natural world, and writing. The price paid for those “golden years” leads to the prize: insight, joy, and a kind of peace we were incapable of when we were young.

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The Gospel of Junior

The Book of Junior was economical,

only needing a half dozen commandments:

Gardening is a sacrament,

your tithe paid with hoe and bent back.

Keep everything Godly clean.

Keep the Sabbath, no matter

what the hayfield says.

In fact, go to church every time the door opens

but don’t crow about it.

Your life will tell the tale.

Most of all, don’t throw things away.

Everything, all of it, is a gift.

My dad’s dime store dungeon of detritus

down in the dark basement was a wonder.

Nothing escaped him,

not the broken or rusty

the warped or the worn.

Dozens of nails driven in joists

held bags of treasure:

screws, nails, nuts and bolts,

belts, brackets, brushes and buckets--

anything you could ever want or need

or never want or need.

His underground hardware was a goldmine

to the tinkerer or child of the Depression.

He could’ve bought new

but that’s heresy

in his anti-prosperity gospel.

Living cheap is living humble.

Transcendence is to be saved

by what’s broken,

sanctification sent by self-sufficiency--

Grace from going without.

Junior was the camel

passing through that needle’s eye

every day,

a piece of broken pipe in one hand

rusty wire in the other,

his dusty broken-down brogans

with the recycled laces

shuffling down that Redemption Road.