Christmas 2023 Poem – Best Gifts from Shining Friends*

By V.B. Price

If you lose your pluck, you lose the most there is to you – all you’ve got to live with.
-From an 80-year old woman living in a squatter’s camp on the outskirts of Bakersfield, California in 1936, photographed by Dorothea Lange.

In Memoriam
Jenk
Rini
Skip
Lu
Wendy
Kip
VLP
Marc
Marjorie
George
Wombat
Katherine
(An Index)

*Long Gone

We collect their moonglow now, those shining
frames of mind we could think with unafraid;
their best gifts to us: their masterful lives, the genius
of their flourishing, radiant in death. They made

a spacious field for the best of us in ourselves.
Without them we never might have known there is
a space for shining and flourishing within us too.
*

At Christmas, we regale ourselves with their stories,
those rarest of the gifts of chance. Our love for them
tells us who we are. His gift was perfect merriment.
His cheer turned foggy drizzles into popsicle mornings

where we knew for sure we were wizards not magicians.
Only his own folly could disappoint him. But not
his funny bone. It was an orchestra. He conducted

everything as an inside joke, and everyone
was in the know. And she, so beloved, her gift was her certainty,
her unbudgeablity. It had no flipside for us,
no fatal flaw. She showed us how to turn our fear

into an armor of refusal, a refuge that allows our
solitary vigor, through ardent effort, to turn our lives
into an artful mastery of survival worthy of our practice.
*

He knew what he wanted, knew his own standards
with a precision of intelligence that flummoxed
the precious minded, by making objects of farse
into objects of perfection, chrome bumpers adorned

with “shit floats” on stickers. He simply understood
how he thought things must be, and did them that way,
unerringly as a standup comic, with a Zen fun genius

for the barebones laugh. She came from a more rarified
world of hard knocks, rich with kindness swirled
from sorrow, her sister in an iron lung, her deepest love
a prisoner of war. Her pure poems wise for the child

within us all, her mothering heart taking on the world
like a tribe of orphans grieving, painlessly healing the lost
and wounded. Everyone needs to be loved like that.
*

Almost a giant, she contained the culture of the world
in the mind and whimsy of a twelve-year old girl
Going on 90. She could never not be exactly who
she was — Santa Lucia, Wendy, pal of Peter Pan,

whose Oberon, cat king of the fairies, ruled atop his
concrete toadstool surveying reality from afar,
her Shakespeare gardens, charities, lavish as the

Christmas barn, home of flying horses. They would have
communed. He was a man on a lark, a serious conductor
of morning birds, who took the world as it was and made
joy songs to it, until he got his Irish up. Even his

long dance disease, walking backwards sometimes
to move forward, couldn’t quiet the lark he was on,
or tame his temper that bloomed like an Irish rose.
*

His gift was ardent curiosity, an obsession
with finding out, “I like what I know,” he said
and meant it. Self-invented, never bored, he took it
seriously, being all the way alive. “Go for the best,

Nothing less.” He could spot a Titian in a junk yard,
A Membres black-on-white deep behind the coffee cups.
He was a pro in every way, in everything he did. And so

was the gimpy recluse, the Santa Fe Trail rider, ferrier,
the 19th century man, historian stranded in the here and
now, writing book after book under a skylight, no voltage
anywhere near. He gave up everything to make the past

come back to life in the present, knew Kit Carson
like an easy rider; his best gift to us was his gritty
serenity, his life gnarled and grounded as his hands.
*

More interested in listening than in saying,
her gift was showing up where she could,
taking poor kids to the segregated dentist,
mothering a pack of Down syndrome girl scouts,

“adding love to the way things are.” Some say her humor
was pixilated; if she was fey it was like a battlefield
surgeon in a world of hurt and harm, always smiling.

Her best gift was her kindly, matter-of-fact gentility.
For him, the flamethrower never gushed agony. He was
shot before he had to use it. His shy generosity, modest
genius, were magnificently simple, learned as a boy

playing Mozart through a cactus needle, his mastery was
making things work, even his wounded life. His best gift:
the taming of his ego to fit the way the world really was.
*

He was a street person, sous chef, autogenius,
archivist of people and ideas, a deep, crazy lover
of the best of us, the wise, the humane. A celebrant,
a man of reverent libation. His great gift: never stop

being a wondering man, never tame your outrage.
She knew him, even liked him, she who withered
the pretentious with a glance, that visionary of exacting

discipline who showed her students who they really were
at their best. She mastered a golden age, its humor,
violence, glorious lucidity, lyric charm. Her note books
Elizabethan travelogues we marveled at.

Her integrity was solid as her habits were endearing,
ice cold milk, stacks of Oreo cookies, wisdom rooted
in perfect calm, poised and adorned with moral surety.
*

We have become collectors of the best,
of moonlight and blue moons on the rise
along the empty road to Trementina,
collectors of flourishing out of the blue,

of gifting friends whose mastery showed the way
for us to polish our better selves like moon dawns
rising through vales and stormy dells of twilight.
*