Keep your appointment with God

Dispatch #31: plus an unpublished "poem" that never "became" a "thing"

Hi friend,

When Covid hit in 2020, I thought a lot about mortality. I talked & talked about it. I wrote & wrote about it. I started my second poetry manuscript, & a whole ass novel, both of which are premised very deeply on death. As the news of lockdown fully settled into my bones, something came over me. Death was inescapable, incessant, omnipresent – & oddly, I didn’t want to escape it.

Appointment with God #1: keeping my camera ready on a walk through Brooklyn

Like many many drafts, one that I wrote never made it into the final draft of this second manuscript. Instead, it sits on my desktop because it never really “became” a “poem.” The “poem” is a postcard to Angel from the beyond; an exercise in imagining my goneness & speaking to my beloved from her site of loss. The “poem” has the line: Keep your appointment with God.

Out on a walk the other day, out of nowhere, years & years after writing it, that very line appeared as if out of mist & cut a hot trail through my thinking. What does that mean, I thought to myself, to keep an appointment with God? I immediately thought of my meditation practice. Since starting it up again in a daily way in 2020, I have shown up every day (for the most part) for 4 years. 4 whole frikkin’ years, people! That feels like a miracle! Most of the time when I meditate my head is a garble-farble-smash-doom of nonsense & to-do-lists & vengeful “why I oughtas!” (as I’ve mentioned over & over again in this very Substack). Most of the time I’m crabby or tired or doubtful, or how wonderful: all three! In other words, it’s never the ideal experience. LOL. Despite this feeling of sitting quietly inside a head like a murky fish tank cloudy with doo doo & congested with slapping fins, I still do it. Night after night, morning after morning. Why in the heck would I do this? Why wouldn’t I flake or quit? I’ve certainly seriously considered it over the years. So why haven’t I? Because, I pondered on my afternoon stroll…

I’m keeping my appointment with God.*

*Life, possibility, potential, the void, inner space, stillness, the cosmos, beauty, divinity, kinship, imperfection, knowing, vastness, clarity, lightning bolts, buried treasure, unlikely evidence, the murk, compassion, the light, truth, starting over, starting over, starting over, welcoming now.

Appointment with God #2: noticing while en route to dinner with friends

Reader, with full acknowledgment that “God” can be anything that brings you closer to yourself & to this (blazing, impossible, brilliant, messy) life: In what ways do you keep your appointment with God? Let me know. I’ll add a few to meditation: long walks by myself through the city, time with friends, time with my creative work, time with the ocean. These return me to myself, to the mystery of being here, to the joy I innately deserve as a soft creature on a tough planet. These set my perspective toward an openness that can let the unexpected in; the untamable wilderness my small self’s ego tries to machete-whack into submission. Hush, little machete-wielder, the ocean says, or a friend’s deep listening says, or a poem coming together unexpectedly says, you don’t have to try so hard to get somewhere! or to control the uncontrollable! You are a glorious little messy human & I can love you enough for the both of us, if you’ll let me.

And so, dear reader, it is in this spirit that I’m going to do something I never do! I’m going to share that “poem” that never “became” a “thing” with you here.

But first, before the “poem,” an announcement! We’ve officially opened up registration for the July session of In Surreal Life! Join 49 writers from around the globe for an incredibly rich month of community, craft, & deeply-felt care.

Our Visiting Artist line-up this summer is stunning: the poet turned experimental novelist sam sax, fiction writer Amy Lin who wrote this year’s highly lauded life-changing memoir Here After, the phenomenal, ever-candid Angel Nafis (BIPOC break-off group only), the stunning multi-hyphenate (poet/photographer/novelist) Rachel Eliza Griffiths & good old yours truly!

Spots are already filling fast. Apply today! Know a writer who would benefit from In Surreal Life? Forward them this zine! Nominate them to be a Surreal Scholar! This community is so special. Every single session I’m reminded of our power to break the space-time continuum & make it feel like 50 people are having one big sleepover, sharing our favorite poems, getting geeky about craft, & opening up about our blocks & dreams & goals.

And now, as promised, a “poem” that never “became” a “thing.” It is in flux, learning to be itself, complete & still growing (sound like someone you know?)

Get Swell Moon

Angel, I know I’ve disappeared, but listen.

I’m the camellias by your therapist’s door.

I’m an ordinary cloud. 

I’m the covert correspondence between phosphorus and a match.

I’m nowhere. 

You pace the crumbling library steps way past close, spilling a bag of golden raisins in wrinkled constellations, inconsolable. You’re lost. I’m rain. 

I’m the phone lines heaving with seagulls – how did they even get to Grand Army Plaza? The wet has a mind of its own, tortures the concrete with its lectures on free will.

What if I told you I can see you, and I can’t stop talking? Sitting at the back of the B103, you clutch your tote bag, soaked. Seeing you in a simple grey sweatshirt, busted umbrella between your knees, hurts what’s left of me. 

You’ve always been my blood’s happiest deck of cards. You’re the swell in get well soon. I’m camellias an ordinary cloud a flame all at once. Manic, some call it. You can be manic when you’re dead – why not? I am. 

You hold Clifton’s Collected Poems open to my never-ending inscription in blue.

Your breath clearly happens.

Please, be the place. Tell the world about me just by being.

By the way, your Depression’s handsome. Handsome, sweltering, self-luminescent. Relentless! Gay, of course, and strangling as a dark saloon.

Get swell moon, my love.

There’s no heaven.

I’m a dead maniac talking to a fudged window. Okay, I lied about heaven. I’m fervently invested in it. Especially now that I don’t have a body. Taste a mango for me, an avocado, a plum, all my allergies. In your living mouth, my fulfilled appetite.

And Angel, whatever has happened to me, keep your appointment with God.

I know it hurts, but consider this: Does the gap belong to the gap-toothed? Is the hole in the garment the garment’s fault? 

Grief is like trying to remember the lyrics to a math problem. 

Like trying to solve a song.

Keep your appointment with perplexment. I’m dead, but I’m not nowhere. Close the book, smart as it is, and lift your eyes.

Blossoms everywhere, dressed in rain. 

Remember that damp summer afternoon at the sultanic Botanical Garden, a choking coconut-cream perfume stopped us in our tracks, forced us to bury our faces in the source? 

When I met you that April eighth in the basement-bar, you stopped me cold in my tracks, too – a selfsame sticky pistil awhorl with pinkish petals. Oh, I thought, The plot thickens.

Well, look at you, Beshert. 

The deep purple welt of your bottom lip is thrust out in sadness under plump cheeks aglaze with passing streetlights. Your green turban’s hilltop has been made darker for the rain. 

All that life does most clandestinely, not seeking applause, is your appointment.

Don’t underestimate the ways we can meet now. Even the dead turn their heads for gardenias.

Yours in all lives, Shira

Appointment with God #3: noticing the neighborhood while in between errands

Thank you for being here. May you feel connected to the vast network of intelligence that scientists & poets alike humbly call “nature.”

May you touch your reservoir of intuition & feel its ancient depth.

May you remember this simple, foolproof phrase: I can always offer myself more compassion.

Signing off with (glorious former ISL Fellow) Moonheart’s song, People’s Prayer. All proceeds from downloads are being donated to their neighbor Nadir’s family, who are currently trying to evacuate from Gaza.

In the gentle words of Moonheart:

“may we burn down what needs burning
may we tend to what is hurting
may we leave our old hearts
in the old world
may we leave our old hearts
in the old world”

With ample maple syrup,