Fire from the Sky and Heart Work

For my student James

The sky darkens as I sit with him at Tripler,
the pink hospital on Red Hill—
old man, both legs gone above the knee,
not long here for us. The sky outside
his window soon turns a fiery indigo as
the sun moves west toward the sea,
while his books are stacked in the
filtered light on his bedside table—
Pound, Jeffers, Gibran, the Bible.

The last I saw him a decade ago,
not long after I lost my mother
thousands of miles away from
our island in the Pacific. Even then
when he entered my classroom,
he was an old man, trimmed, white beard,
loud laugh and cold blue eyes,
a pack of his poems stuck in his back pocket. 

Years later, when the call came
from the dean’s office urging me
to see him, an endowment on the line,
that I never much liked his poetry,
only tolerated his tortured lines—
that was of no account.
So, the first Tuesday—of a year of Tuesdays,
my heart was pumping hard when
I walked into his room—but James,
same as ever, called out to me,
shouting my classroom mantra and gently
laughing: no archaic language, please!
but it cut to the quick.

Still, I wanted no part of the dying then.
I had not yet learned this thing
about the human heart—that embracing pain
is the only way to survive it.
Even with my grandmother’s story of
her father going to his beloved’s grave
in his village, the Monastery of the Moon,
unsealing her casket in the night air
to hold her in his arms again,
which, when young, I steadfastly refused
to believe. But who knows
what really happens in the Chouf villages
where people still believe in miracles.

Each week driving west into H-1 gridlock,
I began to see the pink building on the hill
as an oasis, the afternoon light working
off the mountains, the glow of it otherworldly.
I would bring ripe papayas and chocolate,
and he would ask me to read to him—
sometimes Pound, sometimes the Bible.
Some days he would tell me about his women,
his five marriages, yes five, with beautiful,
exotic women, he said, one from Sumatra,
and another from the Marquesas
with slim hips and black hair,
the music of the islands still in his eyes
when he said their names.
Sometimes it was his years in the navy, WWII,
all that carnage, how one day he looked up
into the open sky from the deck of the USS Laffey
and saw a kamikaze flashing like sunlit mercury
barreling straight down for him—
fire out of the blue—diving from the sky,
he would say.  How after years of recovery,
he turned to missionary work in Indonesia,
talking scripture like a master.
He was, as Kafka said, a cage looking for a bird.
I could not stop seeing him.
But I knew the next phase was coming fast
when I first saw fear starting to darken his face.

The last Tuesday I saw him, the dreaded
ask came to read Job 38
where the suffering mortal, angry
and in agony, questions the Lord,
where the Lord interrogates the man
with questions that eviscerate him.
My heart blown open by then,
my James knew every word verbatim,
the unknowable, the unfathomable
confounding us both. Then for the first time,
looking into my eyes, he asked me
to hold his hand—the room began spinning
a cobalt blue—just for a minute,
he said, and in a moment of strange alchemy,
as if my spirit left my body,
I was neither here nor there.
Rather, I was holding my mother’s hand
her breathing labored, when her sharp words
repeated to me as a young child:
your father spoils you rotten, vanished
in that moment of grace,
and a turbulent love hovered
over us all in that room, in that light.

When the call from staff came at 4AM
to identify him days later, I had been dreaming—
I was in my mother’s room, the cold
California sun was no longer streaming
through her windows. I had covered her
with a blanket, but the air had gone thin,
and the sky—I remembered looking out—
was a brilliant blue until
the last remnants of all that earthly
fire-light went suddenly dark.