THE BOOK OF HOURS (2013)

This collection—named after Rainer Maria Rilke’s collection of poems—has become an annual project in recent years during the Bahá’í month of fasting. Last year, the content was broadened somewhat beyond the themes of fasting and renewal, and I have carried that over into this year’s writing sessions. While last year was characterized by short, terse verses, this year, in contrast, is one large poem written during the entire nineteen-day fasting period.

I’ve missed the start of the fasting season.
I’m sick with one of the worst colds
I can remember having. It makes these days
strangely like any other days, even though
my Facebook feed is flooded with posts about the Fast—
pictures of the food people will enjoy when
sunset comes, pictures of the breakfasts people eat,
and quotes from Rumi on the magic of an empty stomach.
A couple days later my cold morphs
into the worst flu I can remember having,
and I leave the Internet world behind and take to my bed,
sleeping 17 or 18 hours of the day.
It’s a real liberation, actually. I’m too sick to do anything.
I only have the energy to drink water and orange juice.
Food is too much. I’m so sick I can’t even finish
a couple cornbread muffins. Just the fluids and
sleeping for hours. Even when I’ve slept so much
that I can’t sleep anymore, drinking fluids takes away
my energy and I’m back out again for a few more hours.
I wish the last few school rejections would come in now.
I don’t have the energy to care. I seem to have
my own renewals. Last night I dreamed an infant boy
with big, curious cartoon eyes emerged out of the water
and clung to my arm like a frog. We were laughing like crazy.
Renewal is happening all the time, 
even when you can’t participate in it.

My friend was a friend of a holocaust survivor. He never
made it to the camps, though. He was about fourteen,
and his mother helped him jump off the train before they arrived.
The rest of his family died in the camps. He went on
to obtain a doctorate in comparative literature,
and became well known in Europe as a novelist, essayist and poet.
I once sent him an email at my friend’s suggestion,
about submitting some of my own poems to a publication
this man was editing. He sent a short but kind response
saying that the project was dead in the water. It was
nice of him to respond to me. It’s easy to ignore an email—
from someone you know, let alone from someone
you’ve never met. I have left a good number of emails
unanswered. Friends checking in, others asking for some help
with a project. It’s easier to simply disappear under the radar
than to share with people how disappointing
life has turned out to be. It’s easier to make it
like I don’t exist anymore. That was a much easier thing to do
before the advent of social media. The spaces
between peoples’ lives were wider and deeper
and that was just part of their world. Years, decades,
maybe even the rest of your life without knowing
what happened to a person. Most of those spaces have now
been filled in. There’s no escaping. With people sharing
so many pointless tidbits about their lives, no one ever thought
about whether there are any important things worth sharing.
Social media seems to just reveal how meaningless
our lives are. I hide the pointless things from Facebook,
but that reveals all the important milestones
I have not yet crossed. And maybe will never cross.
I live in a single-room house, like Abraham Lincoln’s
log cabin. I play with the keychain that holds my truck keys.
At the end of the Fast comes the Bahá’í New Year,
on the first day of spring. This year the community will enjoy
water and Lays potato chips for our feast.
It’s all we’re able to afford. This year’s fast is tainted by
the sound of me coughing in my sleep. 

My father is a sweet man, and I think
he probably always was, even as a child.
But his father didn’t bring it out of him.
It was a harsh stance between
father and son. My grandfather’s father,
a semi-professional boxer, was known
to get drunk and come home
and wail on the kids, so fathers
showing sons their love
isn’t something that happens naturally
in the Cornelius line.
My grandfather was not physically harsh
to my dad, not regularly anyway. But he was
harsh in what he said, like accusing Dad
of stealing a pound of butter from Baldi’s Market 
down the road. My dad once said,
“If I brought home a pound of butter, I bought it.
If I came home with five pounds, I stole it.
Because why steal one when you can steal five?”
Dad never took a harsh stance with my brother or me,
not like his dad. Grandpa didn’t do that
with us, either. It’s an unusual relationship
between fathers and sons in our family.
We’re pretty sure how we feel,
but we don’t say it. One evening after dinner we were
watching Forrest Gump. Dad sat down during the scene
when Forrest visits Jenny and, quickly after meeting her son,
learns he is the boy’s father. When Jenny asks him,
“Isn’t he beautiful?” and Forrest responds,
“He’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Dad said,
“Just like you, Matty.” I wasn’t really paying attention
to what he was saying until he quipped,
“Too bad you’ve gotten so ugly since then,” and he laughed,
while wiping away tears from his eyes. We all laughed.
We laugh when telling each other we love one another.
That’s my dad. He can’t really tell me he loves me
without a wisecrack tacked on at the end. It would feel odd to me
if there were no wisecrack. I’m not one to tell people
I love them either. I’d rather they know
without my having to say it.
But Grandpa still worried about Dad,
though he’d never tell Dad that.
When Dad would speed his car
up and down the winding Mark West Springs Road
in the middle of the night, Grandpa said he
and Grandma would lie in bed and worry.
Something Grandpa told my mom
20 or 30 years after it happened.

My mother is cutting out paper shamrocks. In my recovery
I watch a few documentaries about Nelson Mandela. They make me
miss Africa quite a bit, and it reminds me of how much
I want to go back there. In between watching the films
I check my email, hoping the last couple schools
will send me the rejection letters. I already know it’s coming,
the rejection. Now I’m just getting frustrated it’s taking so long.
I don’t want to have to call anyone on the phone and
ask about the status. I prefer the impersonal letter from some
dean of the graduate school, or the chair of the department’s
admissions committee, or whoever. I don’t even
fully read them anymore. I do a quick scan for words like “sorry”
or “regret”. Then I know it’s a done deal. Over the next couple of days, 
the final letters (at least the ones that matter) 
arrive in my inbox. I take the defeat rather well.
The paper shamrocks remind me spring is coming.
As do the budding hydrangeas outside my bedroom window.

Food has little appeal when you’re sick,
but you eat to regain your strength. There isn’t any enjoyment.
In prison they try to break your strength, break your spirit.
Ahmed Kathrada, a prison-mate of Nelson Mandela on Robben Island,
described prison as a very unnatural place, and said
every prisoner misses the presence of children.
“Looking out the window, seeing from a distance the wardens
and their families and their little kids, it was a wonderful sight.”
Mandela was later transferred to the low-security
Victor Verster Prison, where he lived in a private house
within the compound. Kathrada said, “When we visited Mandela,
we saw a microwave for the first time. We hadn’t seen
a computer yet. It’s like Rip Van Winkle waking up
from years and years of sleep, coming out into
a different world altogether. The technological revolution
had passed us by. We came out in a different world.
When we went, there was just one road,
cars going this way and that way. You come out and you see
three, four, five lanes. Seat belts, hazard lights, off ramps,
everything was changed.” The change seems less real
when it builds up around you, gradually.
At dawn I begin coughing myself awake.
This world is becoming most unnatural. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says,
“The days spent in this life are like a mirage,
and the existence of the creatures therein is illusory,
without foundation, and nonexistent.” And I
get out of bed everyday like it matters a whole lot.
I can try to do what I love, or I can be forbidden
from doing what I love, there is less difference
between the two than you might think.

When I’m finally able to start fasting, I have trouble sleeping.
On the night we spring forward for daylight savings time,
my mother is restless. She is awake at 2:00 a.m.
to watch the clocks automatically skip ahead one hour.
Later I hear the antique clock chime five times,
and a moment later, six times. Mom is up again, still restless.
She wipes up crumbs on the counter and says, “For God sakes…”
Dad has been eating the chocolate cake.

There are things outside my door, invisible horsemen
trying to get in. They don’t scare me. They’re not there
to scare me. Sometimes I feel them hover over me
as I lay on the couch in a semi-conscious state.
The ferns are dead and you have no other choice
but to let people come in the door.

When I read the words of God, everything in me dries up.
All the ropes are burned away, all the small and
meaningless things vanish, but in the ensuing liberation,
I also feel small and meaningless. Like everything is beyond me.
Like I can only understand what’s in front of me,
though there’s nothing to understand, except how to
bide my time with each passing day until
there are no more days. I could chase old leads,
but my blood has dried up too. The anxiety is always there,
but the intensity comes and goes. A new rhythm emerges
after a few days. But every time the voice of God
says something new, at least to my eyes,
some new words in the light of progress, my world
shrivels up and I become aware of how
important all of it is to me, all these shadows.

I never knew my other grandfather, my mom’s dad.
He died when I was one. But I hear lots of stories about him.
Other people that I don’t know very well
tell me they knew him and admired him.
It’s somewhat strange to have strangers tell you
about someone you are related to, someone you’ve met.
Though I have no memories of him,
his absence is still felt after 30 years. It affects
many people in my family, and not in the best of ways.
My mother tells lots of stories about him. The people I know now
seem to be different than they were when my grandfather
was alive. I once remarked to my mother,
“Things probably would have been different if he were
still alive, or at least if he lived longer.” My mom responded,
“Very different.” When I was a baby, on Mother’s Day
everyone was over at my grandparents’ house,
the same house where my mom grew up. Mom says
she laid me down in the basinet for a nap. My grandfather
kept walking over and looking down at me. After a short while,
he said to me, “You know, you’re never gonna go to sleep
if I keep lookin’ atcha. Want some pie?” He picked me up
out of the basinet, sat me on his lap, and we ate
blackberry pie together. He died the next day.
He was at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco,
getting ready to give a film presentation
on the Bahá’í Faith for a class. He asked the instructor
for a glass of water, and went.

He had been in poor health for a long time.
His breathing was bad. Fluid would
build up in his lungs, and he had to use
a machine to suck it out.
In 1963, he and my grandmother made a pilgrimage
to Haifa and ‘Akká in Israel. He took film and photographs,
brought them back to America
and frequently showed them to Bahá’ís to encourage them
to make a pilgrimage themselves. Forty years later,
I met a couple when I was working at the Bahá’í World Centre
in Haifa. They said they knew my grandfather and
remember him showing the film footage of his pilgrimage.
While on pilgrimage, my grandparents met Saichiro Fujita,
‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s faithful gardener. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá regularly
tugged on Fujita’s thin beard, while Fujita once hid
the Master’s cat. In addition to their practical jokes,
the two often took their meals together. Fujita planted
many of the gardens at the Bahá’í World Centre,
which became more and more
extensive over time, but insisted that my grandparents
visit his own personal garden. He took them up the hill
to see it. When my grandfather struggled to breathe and
keep up pace, Fujita exuberantly kept assuring them
it wasn’t much farther, and held his hands to my grandfather’s back
and gently pushed him the rest of the way up the hill.
My grandmother still laughs when she tells the story. 

My mother isn’t fasting this year. She’s not in the best of health.
So I’m alone when I get up before sunrise. I pray alone.
I eat breakfast alone. And when sunrise comes, I again
pray alone. But I don’t mind it, being alone.
Most years I have shared the experience with others.
With my mother. With flatmates, neighbors and friends
in Haifa. I lived alone when I was in Berkeley.
Those two years I mostly fasted alone. I ate and prayed alone
in the morning, and on most nights I broke the fast at dusk
alone. At the time, it’s what I preferred. I broke bread with others
in the evenings on a few occasions, but I really
preferred to be alone. I fasted in Lesotho as well.
Most mornings and evenings, I was with my friend Thabo.
In the evenings, we would sit on the floor of his small room
and say prayers together, just before sunset.
Sometimes he would pray in Sesotho.
It was the end of summer there, the late afternoons were warm.
I was still trying to learn the names of a lot of people—
Tlokotsi, Khiba, Tsepiso Tumelo—and Thabo would help me.
When he wasn’t there, I was on my own. On those days,
before breaking my fast, I would pray while pacing
in the dry grassy field of the compound where I was staying.
In the distance were rolling green hills as far as the eye could see.
The caretakers had a daughter who was nearly
three years old at the time. Often she would playfully
pace with me. She was quiet, for the most part.
The other day I looked out my window at the green hills,
it reminded me of the green hills in Lesotho.

I change the battery on the wall clock, the slow hands
seem to compress the failure and disappointment
that are there every morning. It makes praying before dawn
heavy this year, all the stammering.
It is a lavish banquet I cannot offer.
I am rich in an unresponsive God, a silent God.
It is a God that I approach but Who keeps me distant.
It is an awful approach. The silence is a way of not caring
whether I call Him merciful or wrathful.
I take a bite of my macho burrito and start laughing.
I laugh and laugh and wonder when I became so important.
Is there any turning back, being reborn out of myself,
being taken out of the old paintboxes?
My laughter and a silent God, it is an understanding
I can’t understand, but I will trust it.
The hands of the clock are on time now,
and the hydrangeas outside my window continue to bud.

I go to bed, the watchful woman stands in the window
and is unaware of Christ’s wounds. I am too timid
to say anything to her. I can only communicate by gesture,
but we’ve lost that interpretive capability.
I speed along the coastal highway and nearly fly off
the edge of a cliff. Though I’d often rather be dead,
nearly getting myself killed isn’t on purpose.
I’m not wearing my seatbelt, but I put it on
as soon as I come into town. It’s a different pace
here in the coastal towns. I pass by someone on a motorcycle,
the old coffee shop has closed up.
There’s nothing to apologize for. Our lives go in
different directions. People get married, people get jobs,
people move to a different state. Maybe sometime
down the line there will be more to say. Much as we think
we understand people, there are many things about them
we can’t. Our minds operate within a certain framework,
and to step outside of it leads to the wrong conclusions.
We follow the wrong god home. It’s easier to be polite
and say, “Fine, thank you.” We never quite get
to the heart of anything, but it keeps the misunderstandings
from getting out of control.

Tonight the New Year celebrations are at Granny’s. 
I hear Mom telling a few people about how Granny
and my grandfather became Bahá’ís. My grandfather’s
mother taught them both. Mom also tells,
to a woman who recently lost her own father,
the story of my grandfather’s death.
There is a sadness they can share with one another,
it’s in their eyes. Granny’s house is a small house,
not the kind some would like to be seen in.
But it’s been here for decades. We have our water
and Lays potato chips, and a prayer.
Never too much of anything anymore, it seems.
People are so tired. But it is a new year.
The bluebirds will come out soon. We will let them out.
People will see each other and ask how they are,
and we will all say, “Fine, thank you.” And that will be all of it.
In lean years, in dark years, people are afraid
to ask any more. They’re afraid to want to know any more.
This is how our spring will start. Sparsely. Quietly.

(March 21, 2013)