The Blue Pearl

“The Blue Pearl is the vehicle of the individual soul. It is in the Blue Pearl that the soul leaves the body after death and travels to different worlds. It is extremely fine and subtle, and it moves like lightning... The Blue Pearl is the size of a sesame seed, but in reality it is so vast that it contains the entire universe.”—Swami Muktananda, Meditate

I read Meditate in the mid-’90s, a few years before my wife’s death. After her death, nothing seemed equal to the grief I was feeling. My life was a shattered pane of glass. I needed something to hold myself together. This is when the Blue Pearl came to me, or so it seemed—not as an external truth but simply as God-knows-what, floating in my tears. I held it to my heart. Perhaps now it’s time to share “The Blue Pearl,” a poem I wrote in the midst of my grief, which put the grief into context.

THE BLUE PEARL

A silver moon blesses

the Osco parking lot

as my wife lies sleeping

with terminal cancer.

This is her homecoming.

My breast pocket bulges

with prescription morphine

and I have just been accused

of stealing milk.

What I mean to say

is that life is good.

This is the secret of cancer,

that as it eats away

at the skin of the future,

it reveals, slowly,

in cold, hard luster,

beneath the ticking of days and hours,

the blue pearl,

our irreducible spirit

and connecting point to the stars.

It is the steady wonder

that life goes on.

It had been a bad week,

with Barbara’s lower GI

laid bare on Monday

to the surgeon’s disquieted eye:

Fifty liver lesions discouraged

an adventurous scalpel

from cutting a swath to the pancreas.

They sewed up the belly,

the soft belly I’d

gotten used to growing old

resting my head on,

and told her what happens

next is that you die.

This is the cancer

the saints get,

the ones too selfless

to endure the pain

of others.

On Tuesday they fed her

bile and comfort, salving

the desolate corpse of hope

with med school pity

and averted eyes.

And on Friday, after she’d begun

farting again and it was time

to go home, the season premiere of

“Sabrina the Teenage Witch”

wrenched our loving

family into three small

angry pieces.

The soft bondage of love,

souls in a crucible,

so lost together, our lives

cluttered with one another’s needs,

we make peace, then suddenly

kick out in frenzied yearning

for freedom and muddy

the elixir that cushions us: This

is a family, now strained

by death. Our daughter,

eleven, a trooper, a brave angel,

commutes willingly from school

to hospital, diagrams sentences

in Mom’s wheelchair,

parts the IV tubes to

give her kisses and eats

lime Jell-O all week;

she asks one thing only

that isn’t brave and chin-up,

to watch “Sabrina” at 7.

But Barbara cannot bear

another confined hour here

and so we snap

off the overhead box

and go, gracelessly,

at our sudden worst,

bleeding insults and disappointment

in the privacy

of our car ride home

to a new life.

And I understand that we need

a miracle but

the best I can offer

is my silence;

silence humbles me;

slowly I stop knowing

what to do.

I wait for the morphine

in fluorescent loneliness.

When my name is called

I heft as much of the future

as I am sure of—a sweating

gallon of milk for tomorrow’s

breakfast—upon the counter

and pay, thinking, this much

is done. But life

undoes me like a dirty bandage.

I’m challenged at the door,

humiliated for 30 seconds—

this is a neighborhood

where milk is stolen regularly,

perhaps—and finally,

the transaction verified,

I am released

to the moon

and my own soul.

In the lifeless parking lot

my wild heart,

so big and wanting

happiness, a cure for

cancer or just five years

five years to perfectly

love my wife, stops,

lets go of itself,

bears for an instant

the silver-streaked now

of truth,

now now only now

and always now

she is alive

and I am alive

and that’s my miracle

and it’s enough.