A Shrine for Paul Pines (1941 - 2018)
Easter is or should be an occasion for revelation and ritual, prayer and reflection, pageantry and passion. My ideal demographic for celebrating its conceit would be the deeply observant, the remote bystander, the variously non-Christian, even the antagonistic, indifferent, or downright non-religious. Everyone! The process promised by its occasion is toward mind-movement, the imagination instilling the art/knot/anchor of enterprising otherness, thinking deeply and differently; deeply differently. Such attitude inclines to poetry's precincts and, on this day, my fellow poet and co-spirit-er Paul Pines comes to mind, heart, art.
Paul passed away last year. I was reading his latest book, Trolling with the Fisher King, on the very night of June 27, 2018, at a quiet local bar and learned the deeply sad news that Paul was gone the following day. Today I was rereading some of his poems, hearing the bells at the local Catholic church (called Epiphany Church! Re: Joyce!) and came back to "Eponymous Paul" from his 2017 volume, which notes its setting as "Easter Morning."
I prefer to celebrate the ever-living voice of this radiant member of our tribe rather than mourn his loss more; deem it more affirming and keeping with his spirit to suggest the Easter metaphor of transformation, ecumenically understood with the lowered "c" in "catholic," returning the Poet back to us in memory and, again and again, in and through his words.
From "Eponymous Paul":
I look for models
foremost among them
my namesake
Paul
late of Tarsus
at the "bloody crossroad"
of ecstasy
and transformation
driven by his desire
to one day
see
as he is seen
but fails to see
this already exists
as an interior
function
that takes
our measure
whether
we see it or
not
**************************************
What holy lines by Paul Pines! A love supreme in eternal echo!! We (that includes You!) will gather at Poets House on Friday May 10, 2019 for the annual spring Marsh Hawk Press book launch. The festivities will include a tribute to Paul (See: https://marshhawkpress.org/ )
Read his many books and pay tribute through the experience of reading--in an Easterly direction! Amen: a Man!
