Jonathon Fink, an Artist in Residence from Fall 2023 wrote the following poem. This poem was published in a 32 page book paired with art by Julie Fink.
In My Hour of Darkness, In My Time of Need
—On September 19, 1973, pioneering “Cosmic American Music” musician Gram Parsons passed away at the age of twenty-six from an overdose at the Joshua Tree Inn in Joshua Tree, California. Following Gram Parson’s death, Parson’s road manager and one of his acquaintances stole Parson’s coffin and body from the Los Angeles International Airport and performed a failed cremation at Cap Rock in Joshua Tree National Monument, attempting to honor what Parsons stated previously and prophetically as his desired request. This poem, which was written with the support of an Artist-in-Residence Fellowship at Joshua Tree National Park, imagines the final moments of Parson’s spirit and voice rising in the smoke of the failed cremation.
There is a voice on the desert wind,
hard lines of relief, and passing from this world
to the next feels as simple as stepping from the blaze
of the midday sun, quivering in the cloudless sky,
to the shade of boulders, the air there
light on the skin, in the lungs, unlike the air
of a tomb, this shadow air cool and rising,
light enough to carry ashes, to feed a flame,
air as fuel, air to carry a voice, not on wings,
but as an updraft, a flurry from which I form
these words. From the flint spark and the swirl
of smoke, I call to you, I, who no longer
can sing, the smoke a curtain I cannot part,
a haze through which I cannot see or stride.
In death, all memories fade as music fades,
though, transformed to flame, some memories
still pull, each rising cinder lighting the desert
as a throb, a glint, and then burning out,
like the fireflies I saw the night after
my father died, a suicide two days
before Christmas when I was twelve.
I wandered alone through the orange grove,
though I cannot remember if it was then or before,
the limbs heavy and hanging as the fireflies
gleamed, like my father in the Second World War,
a fighter pilot, there at the bombing
of Pearl Harbor, the flashes of fire in the sky
imprinted on his mind, the back of his eyelids,
stars in negative that no drink could quell,
my mother, lost too from this earth,
from cirrhosis, the day I graduated
high school. I remember both so little
and so much—the Cambridge sidewalk
bricks jutting up beneath my sock feat
as I walked home still drunk one morning
after playing a show late into the night,
my new boots dangling from one hand,
having rubbed blisters into my heels,
my guitar in the other, and before me
the Charles and the first glint of the sun
on the water, a rower in a single scull,
the oars dipping and feathering
like the divide between the living
and the dead, the future and the past,
and the boat’s thin wake trailing and dissipating.
How easy it is to pull with the current,
to move in one direction while facing
the other, the near silence except
for the creak of the oars, their slight dips
through the surface, and then their rise.
All of this returns to me, though at the time
I only thought of home, one thousand miles
away. I always was aware that I would die,
but even now I do not want to go.
There is so much still I want say.
To Nancy, Polly, and Gretchen, all distant
and estranged, you must search your thoughts
of me alone, as you have already,
and must further learn to do. I cannot tell you
what to think of me, and even if I could,
your thoughts are yours alone. Mine rise
to me in this smoke and flame, and I try
to shape you in my mind. Polly slips
between my fingers as if into a well.
Her hand reaches for me, and I don’t
or can’t reach back, the well a throat,
the water there dark and swirling
like her mother Nancy’s hair,
dark as the pupils of Nancy’s eyes,
her lowered gaze, turning from me in tears,
in anger, telling me it was all my fault
as I left again, the final time, yet it was I,
I think, beneath the waves, and they above,
peering down from the edge of a boat,
their forms rippling, and I could not hear
their words. I see now that it was my throat
the water filled, vines from the ocean floor
pulling me, thorns into my skin, their dark poison
restraining and suspending me, wrapping
my throat, numbing me, never fully asleep
or awake. Polly, I have no claim on you
beyond my remorse. I will be forever
the father you did not know, the reed
of my voice all that remains, causing you
to search for me in the arms of others,
to stare into the faces on a subway train,
their bodies jolting at each turn and the light
pulsing like a movie reel at each squealing stop,
your reflection held in the tinted window
within the subway car, spectral and ephemeral,
as you think you see me reflected,
standing at your side, my back to you,
so much so you try to stand as the subway turns,
and stumble, reach for the pole, a stranger
catching your arm, but when you lift your gaze
the stranger is not me, and you are alone again.
Your future without me will become your present
and your past, and I see you returning
again and again to the hotel room
that held my last slowing breaths,
you on the bed there in the dark
beneath the soundless fan blade, lying
where I had lain, your form giving shape
to mine as a lone record turns in the room
like the questions you will have of me forever.
Gretchen, my hope is you will remember me
as on our wedding day and not as I am now
in the end, already separated from you,
your long-sleeve wedding dress abandoned,
its form a resignation, hanging like Spanish moss
in a closet at your father’s New Orleans estate.
I would say one thousand times I am sorry
though I do not know what good it would do.
All I ever wanted was to sing. When asking
how hard it was for me and Emmylou
to harmonize, an interviewer, assuming
the intricacies made the process hard,
leaned forward in his chair, two fingers
at his dimpled chin, then smirked
when Emmylou and I both laughed.
Singing with Emmylou was the easiest thing
I had ever done, easy in its very nature.
Our voices intertwined like the colors
of the desert sky when the sun resigned
behind the rock outcroppings and the mountains.
I wish that I could say I understand it all,
yet all I know and feel is longing
for what I leave behind.
Already, the authorities are en route.
The coffin burns yet will not be consumed.
There is a limit to how high this smoke
will rise. It thins as all things thin
and cannot hold these memories long.
My hopes and sorrows merge and dim.
Beloveds, sing for me from where I cannot sing,
and speak from where I cannot call.
From smoke, I merge into the air and sky.
Behold my desert stars’ last bloom.
