The Eulogy for James Nicholas Potter I follows: Who was Jim Potter?

About this poem

News of my father’s death, which solidified his passing, filled me with odd mixtures of emotions and feelings some wrapped up securely in afterthoughts of long ago and others still feeling the glow of new. Every so often now, unlike each prior passing moment to minute to hour to period to afternoon to day to week to month, a ghost voice calls in my head…just so every often now, hear? That voice commands and deserves respect from surviving flame and rock, water and space, for it emanates from that same place from which all does. Commonly human beings speak of divine love, but rarely do they truly know its terror. For, only the most righteous of character, those who do not wrong any-thing or –one and love concretely to universally, will see the next phase in goodly manner. It prophetically utters of something unknown that will manifest later. Not now, for he is tired…. In the end, if we face not ourselves and that part of us others know, unknown to us, with equanimity and candor, then we know little more than what we want to say we are…The Jim Potter I knew was headed down a path that wanted to move between the lines, blurring them into obscurity. On the morning I received the call about my father’s death, I was shooting this old gnarled pine perched atop a craggy face of the scrabbly boulders loose zone oceanside hundred foot cliff, which shooting proved a tad precarious and in any case arduous in order to get any worthwhile in such low light without a tripod. I spent an unusually long time trying to ultimately get that shot that I saw as the cover of a book about dying and death from the perspective of one who has done so. After a half hour longer than my normal five-minute stop, I encountered a presence. It was never there before. I froze and slowly pivoted to look as directly at this presence as I could and try to see it more clearly as it appeared to enter into vision and then effervesce out of vision to a murky collection of slowly moving shadows. When I caught a solid glimpse of what I could not identify as anything seen prior, from out of the soft-blackness came a voice that was in my head, not in my ears. The specter, soul, ghost, spirit, whatever “it” was, was energy for sure, and it identified itself as my father. I didn’t write everything the presence of energy that was my father said to me, BECAUSE I THOUGHT I WOULD NEVER FORGET!, and doesn’t this refrain oft-used haunt me now. Severe Retrograde Amnesia from two different TBI assaults stole all my lived memories. Including the words that formed inside my mind placed there from outside of my body by that energy, that presence, that blackish, shadowy cool entity that was my dead father I was soon to find out after hiking the redwoods and shooting a memorable pool Rorschach series when a former family member friend called to give me the news. I wrote this poem in my head after returning home. more »