While my dad was dying I felt I needed the strength of a lorica to protect me emotionally. I intended to write it before I went to see him in the hospital in Minnesota, but somehow I didn’t get to it. On the flight home, I started to write a lorica, but it ended up being for him, not me. I wrote one draft and started copying out a second, and then we were on the ground. I put it aside and rediscovered it today. St. Patrick used his lorica to transform into a deer to avoid attack.

Bill’s Lorica

in the sparkling northwoods blue-green
today we gather
warmth of the longtime sun
to make a blanket for your bones
thick purple-brown twining grape vines
to knit a secret room of shade
a closed space without fear
to lie a long body down
to let go the burden of being upright

here in the crushed green
of fiddlehead and jewelweed
trilliums silently go crimson
binding our carmine blood
and this bit of wood

in the still pulpit, jack sits,
a silent preacher with nothing left to judge
only to witness you rest
accepting hard scars that will turn to moss
your angular bones to be rounded with time

we bring the pull of purple magnetite
the charged ions/counterbalance
positive/negative canceled/reconciled

we gather the echo in the steep shale walls
leaves written with pressure in time’s patient book
shut now

we call on the grosbeak’s brilliant rose-petal stained breast
his love sung not said

we call upon the restless waves
smoothing the past
readying the sunset canvas
curving to calm in a still quiet bay

and up here in the buoyant cumulus fields
today we weave all these ragged fragments together
a last quilt of protection
you pull to your chin

then you split down the middle
and turn to deer
as the jester’s gavel drops
on the hours of needing
to be more