poem | Poetry Hotel Press

For Mary Rudge

Mary—can scarcely believe it.
Just back from LA—would have liked to have told you about it.
I lost my Catholicism so many years back,
will never regain it
but I would have gone to church with you.
If anyone had power to bless…
But you would not receive such praise
We who are luminous
I loved the hum of your voice
the sweetness of your consciousness
that found good in everyone
are radiant
And you were Irish
Oh, Mary,
named for the mother of heaven
Stella maris, star of the sea,
are 90 % light,
how you loved ritual, color, dance
how your words
moved to the movement
in homage to spirit inhabiting everything
(as Pagan a thing as Christian)
Flames loop and leap the arteries
There is a core of ember in the womb
—Can scarcely believe your vanishing
beyond our brightness
beyond anything I can know
I remember your sweetness
your love of art
your passion for justice
in the bodies of strong women
reality and dream and memory
with hard and thudding rhythms of our love
my love for you remains
here, on this earth,
under the deep sky of california
passionate and lasting as the redwoods
(like the one planted in 1980 by William Everson!)
and wishing that I am terribly wrong
about heaven
about the afterlife
so that you
might live
in all your dearness
in a house
that is on no corner
of any earthly city—
that you might have
the mansion
denied you
in life
[lines in italics from Mary Rudge’s book, Water Planet]