December 3, 2025
Wednesday

I’m subscribed to an Advent poetry program put out by Anam Cara Ministries, described by Tara Owens, its founder and executive director, as “a place dedicated to the practice of soul friendship, coming alongside one another in order to facilitate healing, wholeness, holiness, and spiritual formation.” I’m a spiritual seeker, currently without an ongoing relationship with a spiritual director. This has happened because of the dislocations in my life over the last two years, and the closing in 2021 of the Jesuit Center for Spiritual Growth at Wernersville, where I had been a frequent visitor for more than twenty years. The daily poetry offering for Advent appealed to me for its emphasis on healing and preparation for the hard hard work ahead of us to lift our country out of the slough of despond our leadership has plunged us into.

I present here in its entirety today’s poem, “What the Living Do,” by Marie Howe, an accomplished American poet born in 1950 who wrote it as an elegy for her beloved brother John, dead of an AIDS-related illness in 1989, when he was just 28.

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

In some ways, my everyday life right now is not unlike the one the speaker in the poem describes. I need to make phone calls about glitches in the house computer network, the water heater that doesn’t seem to be delivering enough hot water for one shower, even though the number of showers being taken daily is down by half, some items in storage that I’d like retrieved. I need to install and begin using the new behemoth of a trash receptacle that is almost too tall for me to heave my filled bags into. My toes are always cold. The clutter of two years’ neglect of housekeeping exhausts me just to think about.

And then there is a moment, one pierced moment whiter than the rest*, when I, too, become speechless. I am living. I am remembering.

*the image is from E. E. Cummings, from “it is at moments after i have dreamed.” You should go read it. You should glare at the site designer’s rendering of the poet’s name.