Gold
For Matteo
David Hockney: A Bigger Splash: 1967
Gold
For Matteo
“God is dead” is such a presumptuous statement.
God is not dead. God dies every day in many different ways: for each of us, a separate death.
When did God die for me? I think I was thirteen.
My friend Matteo was with his mum in a computer shop. They were speaking to the salesman in the blue shirt about the price of a laptop.
Matteo had terminal cancer and was trying to work out whether the price of the latest model would drop if he waited three months.
Modelling that against the fact he had nine months left to live.
The salesman, encumbered with this knowledge, said he couldn’t help much. He apologised. He didn’t have access to such information.
Matteo was tall and tanned and loved swimming. He had the blondest hair. In the Balearic sun, it shone platinum. He spoke Spanish, English and German, his white teeth always visible.
Whenever I think of him, I think of gold.
If he had grown up, he would have been the love of someone’s life.
But he didn’t.
He didn’t get that new laptop either, and the next time we were in Spain, I looked over and the aquamarine pool was empty, the only ripples from the wind.
The pink-striped deckchair, abandoned. Faded fabric sagging down, as if the nothing sitting in it, had weight.
There was no silence.
The pool’s filter slapped open and shut. Wasps struggled in the surface tension of the water. Cicadas incessantly calling to each other from cactuses.
The noon sun obliterating colour. The afternoon smelt of chlorine and far-off fires.
I think that’s when the absence filled me.
This is part of a series of memory themed poems… I have no name for yet (Anamnesis?)
Riptides
Author’s Note: This is a poem about the strange urges we sometimes feel in dangerous places.
A sad poem. Sorry about your friend. Our fixed ideas about God die and are reborn as lived experience shows us we cannot capture the totality of being with any fixed and finite conceptualizations. As we live we see the death of our little stories. Perhaps that is what you mean that God dies many times. I have come to believe that our stories about God are not God, and that our stories are attempts to catch a glimpse of the reflection of light off the multiple facets of God. Life, suffering and death are woven into the fabric of existence, as is rebirth of the world with each breath. Faith is our affirmation of hope that these arisings, existing and passing away have meaning and are redemptive even when our hearts are breaking, and that living our embodied life is a participation in the sacred mystery, and is beautiful and holy thing even as we fail to comprehend it. Stay well, James. You have passed on something of the beauty of Matteo to all of us with your fine poem.
“Modelling that against the fact he had nine months left to live” - brutal delivery. Heartbreak sold with this line alone x