Heaven´s Gone

Do the King's men know that heaven's gone?

This is the line that woke me. Woke me? I'm not certain that I
was awake. I stirred from bed, walked to paper. It was as though
an old friend, one I thought had gone travelling and would never
return, had poked his head around the corner of my bedroom door
and, without saying hello, whispered the news to me.

Do the King's men even know that heaven's gone?

When first I wrote it down, I spelled king in lower case, no capital.
I later remade the K into a capital letter, a clearer meaning, a
sharper image. Kristos? The next lines came in a tangle that I
had to untie. In the beginning, Egypt was mentioned, and I had
used the word Christian where Jesus was wanted. Who is this
old friend who visits? Why is it he laughs as though his belly is
filled with a ring of lost and rusted keys? When he smiles - and
he smiles often - you no longer see his eyes.

Before there was a Jesus
No blood dripped from the cross
It was a symbol for the moment when
The spirit entered us
There shone a God in Africa
As bright as any sun
His body now retreats to bone
A lonely skeleton

Heaven's gone
Do the King's men know that
Heaven's gone?

Would you like to be stirred from sleep, driven to paper,
instructed to write such lines? I suppose that I ought to be
grateful. Be happy, Susie writes, worried that I might be
splitting into pieces under the weight of despair. I never
trusted happiness, Robert Duval's character said, in the
movie Tender Mercies, remember? It was after he had
learned that his daughter had died in a car accident. He
was madly hoeing in the garden and his wife came out to
comfort him. He said to her, "I never trusted happiness.
I never did, and never will." I know that he was emotional
at the time, but I took his wisdom to be more enduring
than the feeling.

Happiness? I welcome it, but I sleep with it as one sleeps
with a woman you know will be leaving soon. Despair is
useful, I think. It's more depression that I am concerned
about. Despairing, your feelings are still in motion. That
old noose, Depression, requires stasis. Despair is a river,
then, depression more of a pond. I worry when I picture
algae on the water's skin. When Susie writes to say, "Be
happy," I hold her wish in my arms. But I wonder, upon
reflection, what leads anyone to believe in happiness, let
alone to trust it? I've known it, and it's a good song, but
I wouldn't want to sing it all the time, at least not as it is
presently written. I don't trust it, you see, at least when
it dances without a shadow. I think it cheapens us in some
way if we're not able to remain enjoined with the wound
of the human race, stay with the blood a little longer.

Is that what I mean to say? I think too much happiness
can lead you to forget, almost be lightheaded. And isn't
forgetting a loss of self? Kundera, in his novel, The Book
Of Laughter And Forgetting, said that tyrants and fascists
depend on citizens laughing and forgetting. I remember
agreeing with him when I read it.

I went looking just now for a thumbed-smooth old rock,
wanting to hold its heaviness in my palm. I had a flutter,
remembering that last summer I gave it to Cowboy as
a gift in Austin. So I imagined it in my palm instead,
round roughness of its backside, smooth flatness of its
underbelly, rubbed smooth by the thumbs of men who
were unafraid to go down. This stone was the talking
stick we used in a men's circle for some years. You held
it when it was your turn to share something true, to take
your voice toward a secret, a fierceness, an anger, an
honesty. It was by holding to that rock that you were
given the courage to open a feeling that had closed. The
smoothness was evidence of witness, of lives changing,
of will entering matter. In its way, then, that rock was
as clean as the original cross. Heavy with memory, the
symbol of spirit descending to intersect with flesh. So
beautiful, useful. I am not sure that I would ever call it
happiness, though I can accept the feeling it raises in me.
It inspires awe, for how we are made, how our experience
compels us, how we learn harmony.

In the verse above, where it reads "There was a God
in Africa," I wonder... did a conscious moment enter?
I have, in the way of so many, been haunted and shaken
by news of Africa, the world's failure to be summoned to
its emergency in sufficient numbers with the needed food
and medicine and direction. The image of a skeleton, a
cave of bone, the remains of grace - it is a symbol both
ancient and contemporary.

The departure of the faithful
The doorway broken wide
The ruling house rebuilt too small
The gospel train denied
The vigil moves away from us
The wine spills from the cup
No light has come to fill the sky
So why should we look up?

Heaven's gone
Do the King's men know that
Heaven's gone?

It was four in the morning when I wrote this down,
and when I read it after sleeping again I said to myself,
who would want to read such a thing? Is it sadness?
I know that some of my writing over the past years,
most especially since the 2004 election in the United
States, has come to question the use and misuse of the
name of God, not only in the stealing of meaning from
people's spiritual experience but also in covering over
atrocities. Perhaps it was even before the election, in
that moment in New York, when the President crudely
interrupted the coming together of the world in grief
to stand at the gravesides of his own people to advance
his own agenda for empire. A flame was pinched, snuffed.
America separated from the heart, went from grief to
fear. Used the name of spirit in vain.

The departure of the faithful.

I saw lines of people moving slowly away from the worship
place. There were so many of them, and they could no
longer fit inside this church. It had become too small. They
were looking down. Judging by their posture and slow steps,
I think they must have believed that their God was still
inside that building, more than he was inside their own
bodies. I wanted to whisper something to them.

Before there was a Jesus
No blood dripped from the cross

I wish to write a third verse, from a different mixture of
kronos and kairos, but in which place and era will it begin?
Will the pre-Christian pagan origins of worship have a
place in this song? What do I want from this last verse?
I want it to sink into the soil, or, like the sun at day's end,
have it appear to dive under the sea. The heaviness, as
when the body of a loved one lays atop your own. The
heaviness that is really a lightness, for it produces a
surrender. Eros. Knowing we die, we guard each other
with resurgence and renewal. Some old poet said that.
I think I am beginning to sense how much the dust has
to tell us. From so many graves, these voices. The decent
spirit, remembering.

In the ritual of day and night
The sun becomes the crown
The King will rise, the King will fall
The sun go sinking down
Symbols on an ancient grave
Prayers preserved in dust
The gospel of old Egypt
The water and the rust

Heaven's gone
Would the King's men even know if
Heaven's gone?

In the night I hear a wheel that needs water, its sound
the kind you hear inside your body when you haven't
moved in a while and the joints cry, almost an orgasm
of first movements. It's an old wheel. I may have to roll
it into this song one day, if I can only get it to turn. If I
am able to sing, somehow, in a magic and comprehensible
way of the powers of myth, the blood's song, then I will
bring that rusted wheel under the spill and spell of water
once again. Turn, turn, turn.

For now, I continue hoeing in the garden, with many more
questions than answers, watching feelings come and go. In
my sleep, I walk from pillow to paper, moving slowly in the
direction of the lost and gleaming keys. Sometimes, it is told
to me, despair is that old rusted wheel, and to move it at all
in the course of a lifetime, even if it means breaking one's
shoulder, remains the deepest happiness available.

The soul that cries for water
A balm for where we burn
We put our shoulders to the wheel
And turn and turn and turn
If it be a kind of happiness
If it be the work of will
Bring the water back to those
Who turn the rusted wheel

Heaven´s gone
Would the King´s men even know if
Heaven´s gone?

DL