Tumblings Down
People. We come and we go.
Some let you know that they love you.
Some let you know that they don’t.
People die on you. Here, then not.
Not everyone at once, no. But everyone.
Then you.
Then everyone again.
*
I’ll be the death guy until I’m done. Beyond that, so the signs suggest.
I’ve been wondering what that asks of me, given that I’ve not been in the trade for years and years.
When in the solid years of your life, the ones that have you flirting with forever, you watch the parade of the summoned go by. I watched it, for years. You know somewhere in your knowing places that it includes you. But it’s a benign inclusion. It costs you so very little to know it. Something else needs to happen, some quickening of the longing for being here, some intrusion, some rankling of the governance of ‘this day, then the next, and so …’
*
I was out walking through the fields this morning, through the raspy grass, the parchment leaves. Boss was with me, utterly arthritic and content. It’s a new kind of cold this morning, the damp and penetrating kind. The poultry cull is done. The manure’s forked and spread. Whatever evaded the crows, the raccoons, the drought, is in the larder now. Matanza is soon. The grey weight of winter is looming. Time to find a matching pair of work gloves in the pile of seasonal equipment orphans.
Yesterday I lopped a few dozen saplings down, to thin the canopy and let the light in a bit. Arbitrary business, deciding what of the young of everything carries on, what won’t. Year’s end is a haunt of sorts, a mortal practice. All Soul’s Day is well placed in my corner of the world.
*
I was lingering in Ireland lately, catching sight of some old ways. The marvel of Irish English is a joy to be worked over by. It is a true victory over acute travail: they’re better at English than the English tend to be. I arrived home here to find that one of Ireland’s native sons and a veritable word man, Manchán Magan, had just then been taken away by the cancer, young and bold as he was.
I met him once, in a car park in John Moriarty’s home town, in the heady aftermath of an inebriating swoon of the gab that included Martin Shaw and Tommy Tiernan. Manchán was giving away his books from the trunk of his car, the Thirty Two Words for Field book particularly an uprising of etymology, a beautiful piece of warfare against the mind in eclipse. A rail of a man and bespectacled, he spoke to me as one familiar and willing to grant to each their due. He let on that he knew my work, and was glad of our meeting. It wasn’t a long meeting. But it was a good one. Later, he wrote a few things in praise of Matrimony, Manchán did. I watched some of his funeral last night, in this the season of tumblings down.
*
Let us linger among the living as if it won’t last.
Let us grow still sometimes at the very sight of life. The very thought of it.
Let us lift our hands in praise for a while, bidding the whole thing goodbye.
-Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom
