Sunday poetry: "Ofrenda for John Gardiner"

One of the pitfalls of not being able to foretell the future — or not having a photographic memory — is that we often can't remember a person's last words to us. If we knew that the end was coming after this particular encounter, then we would obsessively look and listen for details to sear into our gray matter. Instead, we often find ourselves struggling to piece together events that reason tells us we should recall perfectly. Six years ago, I met John Gardiner for the last time outside the Laguna Beach Library. I think it was a summer day. I know that my wife was there as well, and the three of us spoke in the carport below the library. It was probably after a poetry workshop, which would make sense — John and I had been part of the Laguna Poets Workshop together for years. I do remember that he was in a good mood (he typically was; more on that in a moment) and that we exchanged pleasantries about something. Of course, we parted with a smile and every intention to see each other again soon. Not long after, John died of heart disease while driving his car through Laguna. He was 70. The Daily Pilot, in a memorial column, dubbed him "a beloved, disheveled, charismatic ball of energy whose eyes sparkled when he talked about poetry or wolves or Shakespeare."

Those who knew John will nod at that description. Yes, he was disheveled — his typical wardrobe looked like the clothes you throw together on Sunday morning when your better ones are in the wash. Beloved and charismatic, for sure — if the Laguna workshop bestowed official titles, he would have ranked as both king and court jester. I remember the sparkle in the eyes, and more than anything, the voice: that velvety tone, powered by lungs that could easily project to the back of a theater, which caressed beloved phrases or rose to thunder when he talked about subjects that displeased him. At the Laguna workshop, we had a tradition of each poet reading his or her work out loud, then having a fellow workshop member give a second recital. It was always a treat if John volunteered to read your piece; whatever its merits, he dug into it as though he were auditioning for a live performance. If John loved something, he wasn’t shy to celebrate it; he often started workshops with an impromptu dedication, opening some dog-eared pulp novel from the 1960s and booming out a favorite paragraph. If he hated something — Republicans, the Internet, people who picked on coyotes -- he likewise made it known. We listened amused either way. I’ve never known someone who could make a raised voice more soothing.

John was 32 years my senior. Age differences didn’t seem to matter to him. When I attended the launch for his book Coyote Blues, he acted genuinely touched that I had come to see him read. When he briefly hosted a radio show in Laguna Beach, I was his guest for one episode. More than a decade passed of readings, workshops, book launches, and simple friendship. And then he was gone — well, I was about to say “suddenly,” but the Los Angeles Times style guide cautions against using that word. Death is always sudden. The Times advises using “unexpectedly.” John’s death was certainly unexpected. When it happened, I was more or less out of commission as a poet; I had moved out of Orange County and hadn’t been to the workshop in years, and with a one-year-old at home, I wasn’t finding much time to mull over a blank sheet of paper. I broke my own silence to write “Ofrenda for John Gardiner,” the only poem that I have ever written for a person in memoriam. The poem appeared in the first issue of the literary magazine Golden Streetcar and then in Tea and Subtitles: Selected Poems 1999-2019, where it was the sole representative of the last year in the title. That’s the influence that John had on me. Even on three hours of sleep a night, I wasn’t going to be silent about his passing.

"Ofrenda for John Gardiner" appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, almost six years to the day after John's death. Its title is not accurate, really. A poem in honor of the dead can't be for the person it's about, because that person is no longer around to read it. It's for those left here on Earth, a sweet balm for those surviving. We find ways to reason with loss, knowing that we'll be next at some point. In the poem, I imagined an undefined "we" — maybe all of John's friends, maybe just the workshop group — trekking up a hill and delivering John's poem to the cosmos, where they will go on spinning in some kind of celestial grandeur. That's a fun image, but if you asked me if I really believed in an eternal return for poets, I would confess that I didn't, and I have a feeling that John didn't either. I think of that moment in Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California" in which Ginsberg, describing an imaginary night walk with the long-deceased Walt Whitman, pauses and notes, "I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd."

We don't get the odyssey in real life. All we have is the book. What remains of John — now that the twinkle and the voice have passed — is Coyote Blues, and Banned in Mission Viejo, and a handful of other wonderful poems scattered across websites and anthologies. None of those venues are anywhere as big as the cosmos. It's up to us to keep the poems alive. I will close, then, with "Black Swan," which John submitted to Tide Pools, the first Moon Tide Press anthology in 2006:

     If Love comes pulsing like a south swell
     in rain-pelted jungles of my heart,
     palm fronds slicker than enamel
     blood hot as fire

     I will take off my clothing
     and bathe in moonlight like a child
     awkward and stunned;
     layers of loneliness will vanish,
     gauze will clear from my eyes
     like clouds releasing the sun

     Love has nothing to do with feelings
     it's tangible as a coming storm;
     there's one road we're born for
     all we need is a footpath --
     if I can walk with you
     the ground will be there
     even when the road is lost.