Dear Creators,

For a year and a half, I’ve been lost in these stories.

Sundays, left alone in the quiet house to dream, to travel, to make my way back—back into my father’s life, to scenes I never witnessed, couldn’t have, or those I did, ones we shared, father and son, and ones we didn’t; to imagine what they could have meant, may have meant, may still mean to me today.

There is pleasure in this exercise. Some days, it’s the pleasure of tickling a bruise. Others, of picking a scab.

Today, there is a softness to it. It is curled on my lap purring. (Though we all know how quickly the purrer can bare claws and leap.)

Yet, I pause: if it’s purring, does that mean I have healed? And if I have, does that mean I’ve given something up?

Should I feel guilty—to bear this grief gently? To put it down? To let it rest?

I look out across the yard, and catch the winter sun slanting through the naked branches of the freshly trimmed tree. Immediately, I think: how he hated tree trimmers; how he groaned at the ignorant violence of their work!

No—I don’t feel guilty. Not today. For this was his gift to me. And I know he’d smile at how quiet these Sundays have been; Sundays in contemplation, in narration, in creation. In dream. Sundays comfortably tucked into art. (Though he may have suggested we tuck into a movie theater instead.)

Soon, it will be Christmas and I won’t travel anywhere, won’t celebrate anything—such pleasure in being able to opt out! (A pleasure I know he shared.)

I’ll hold myself in repose and practice the hardest of contemporary arts: that of rest.

In the months right after he died, I grasped for the feeling—the physical, human feeling—which his death had taken from me. A feeling rooted in his body: the hot, human reality of his flesh and form.

Here I am trying to feel my way through it, in a poem I wrote at that time:

Tenderness
A woman I am trying to love lets me rest my hand on her naked thigh.
I trace the outline of soft from there up to her belly and around to her chin.
She says, later, You are the most tender man I know, and I think of you,
Pops, the soft of your hands when you held my hands long into my thirties —
The feeling I knew I would miss most: the way you tickled my hand with your
Soft-tipped fingers, held my hand while we were sitting, that model of tenderness.
She says, What do you need from me? And I think of that last morning
When I lay between you and mom in bed and tickled your meaty back,
Read the Braille of moles which rose from you like a spread of Tarot.
It wouldn’t be long before summer came and we pushed everything aside —
When I shaved your beard that last time to clear the fungus from your face.
This woman, the one whom I want to love, but who is unwilling to let me,
Drags her thin fingers down my back one night after we’ve been together
And I sigh in ecstasy:
Is this how you taught me to be a man, or to love, or both?

Thich Nat Hanh writes: “When we lose someone we love, we should remember that the person has not become nothing…Science can help us understand this, because matter cannot be destroyed—it can become energy.”

This energy: contemplation, concentration, creation. Yesterday, your tender touch. Today, these words which reach out like fingertips and offer another kind of tenderness.

This is as much yours as it is mine. As much me as you.

I’ll stop here for 2021.

And wish you all—readers, creators, friends, ghosts—a great start to 2022.

& as always, onward

toward creative joy,

Joey

Brother (left), self (centered—get it?), Father (right). 1985.

The Joy Menu

The Joy Menu #57: Pause