A Resurrected Adam (Part Two)

A Death (For the first part of this five-parted series, click here.) Here, looking down on it, one now defunct decade in southwest Michigan had crowned in a dysfunctional landscape of nonage dissolution as a mother married a step-father, a big half-brother was transferred from one juvenile home to another, two elder step-brothers fled – read more..

A Death

(For the first part of this five-parted series, click here.)

Here, looking down on it, one now defunct decade in southwest Michigan had crowned in a dysfunctional landscape of nonage dissolution as a mother married a step-father, a big half-brother was transferred from one juvenile home to another, two elder step-brothers fled – Mommy and Boy filling their places in that provisionally suburban space – a disillusioned step-sister was committed after swallowing a bottle-full of pills on her sweet sixteenth, hospitalized while a more immediate step-sibling transformed from a brotherly buddy to an abusive bully as his confused companion turned baffled seven and he braced himself to tackle bitter 11, indignant over an indigent father’s aloofness and an alimonied, erratic mother’s schizophrenic attacks on the new nuclear family unit that excluded an affronted her… and, bindingly banished, one strangely stepped merging of paternal and maternal, each paired with youngest sons, yieldingly strained into the 1990s, acquiring a puppy named Tessie as they acclimated to state game woodlands where the graybeard of their countrified built-by-hand box-of-a-home could sidestep the hullabaloo of humanity, verifiably vanished into a no man’s homeland on this isolated lake on that dead-end dirt road –

While that inception of a millennium’s last span unraveled in a revelatory onslaught up north as old Daisy was caught in a crossfire of a father’s new home beside fatally fateful asphalt, slaughtered in sight, breaking Son down as Father broke up with the goddess of his boyhood, and her two offspring – a brother and a sister to him – who incarnated golden recalls of olden, pined-for eras – disappeared from life as hitherto known. It was a time of great loss and unwittingly welcomed gain –

Yes! And throughout seasonal breaks up to a thousand thistly years’ end, enduring the sweeping hours, thornily bored between millennial unease and lured sleep – heaped on the hammock in Dad’s backyard those dog days – on the edge of wildwood, wedged half-way of two-laned highway next to one diminutive dwelling and an intermittently interrupted infinitude of tree-laden refuge – contiguous with Daisy’s grave where, every summertime, ever more wild daisies continuously grew –

And I knew. I knew in my bones. I knew that those wildflowers were her flesh. Each pleasing pedal and up-shot of stem child-cherished representations as we planted ourselves on and in the same sacrosanct soil, above what was below and beneath what was beyond – beyond representations of a reality I wasn’t parentally permitted to believe. Taught that fallen man in his Almighty Dominion over forested and felled land – with held, handed-down heaven or hell-bound souls – without faith – why save myself? – oh, but even in my blind obedience, I knew better! Better of myself and All at the crossroads of an exultant expression of cosmically elemental interconnectivity as I caved into a fundamentally mortal fear while simultaneously, sagely, personifying Death’s being the passing of another as well as encompassing this impermanence of an age – and an All-in-All way of being in the world –

Unfolding into a post-mortem, post-modern adulthood of Death as Punctuated Parting of Unrolling Life – deferring deference in a delayed Today Paradise in giving into a fearfully righteous receptiveness to a God-damned deception – only to feel lonely in firmly enforced beginnings and definitively designated endings as containing seemingly boundaried musings of time in meaning-filled vacant space. Fleetingness and foreverness fusing…

Yes – in the wake of Daisy’s departure, Death awakened me to what it inescapably does in broadly drawing nearer, and claiming as it closes in… Calling on beloved grandparents and a gamut of peers to, in over six years since having departed from the Great Lakes State, a handful of influential figures of its gay community who so informed those formative young adult days – cancer and suicide, a fall down the stairs and an affray on the streets. As Life lengthens, and my awareness of the world widens, it’s impossible not to appreciate how these peculiar men, in particular, deepened my understanding of myself – and how their impact further intensifies this precarious epoch –

And no passing has impressed upon me my own impotence in the face of Death as that of Bryan Higgins – addressing how pressingly important it is to live each phase of Life fully. Oh, Feather Lynn –

(To proceed in this this five-part series, click here.)