The Last Thing Is Longing

By Michelle Rebidoux

Written over a period of approximately twenty years, the poems in this collection are unified in a single theme--the experience of longing. The poems explore multiple expressions of longing--longing for love, for personal relationship, for youth, for beauty, for creativity, for the divine, for transcendence, for immortality--which are explored through the generous use of symbolic (sometimes theological) language, and often through images of nature. The ultimate "thesis" of the book is that while longing serves as the potency to carry one along the road of one's spiritual journey, it is also the last thing that must be let go of in order to reach one's destination--the last thing to be sacrificed before the heart is able to trust and to open to transcendent joy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Dec 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781666791228

Michelle Rebidoux

A native of southern Ontario, Michelle Rebidoux studied art, philosophy, and religious studies at various Canadian universities, receiving her PhD in religion and culture from McGill University in 2008. She currently resides in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where she teaches religious studies at Memorial University and theology at Queen’s College. Her first book of poetry, The Last Thing Is Longing, was published in 2021.

Book preview

We Two

We two fight over

who is to be lover

and who beloved.

Bubbles

Once on the road

to the sea in the morning,

with the sun ablaze behind me,

laughing in its canopy,

I found suddenly that

misplaced part of my belly

where life brews up its potency

as living bubbles of joy.

At the top of the hill I found it

and was wild

with that bright first glance

upon the wide blue water.

I found it in the intimacy

of a moving depth

that promised as a mother

to keep secrets of a daughter.

And one bubble rose up, then,

so high within me

that quick as springtime

it spawned a song and a prayer—

a prayer for Your forgiveness

for the day of reckless play,

a song of heartful gratitude

for the same already given.

Or, in any case, a song

for that rare gift of the bubbles,

and forgiveness

for my exorbitant hunger for them.

The Great Envisioning

Listen, my friends,

it is not a small thing,

no heart’s lyricism,

no enchantment of songing.

When once the decision

is definitively made,

there is no going back upon it

without ruin—body, mind, and soul.

There is no possibility

of dragging a few oddments along.

They are incompatible with the road,

yea! with every cell of being

there in that beckoning place

towards which one leaps now

with bounds of verve and elegance,

like a deer given (almost) wings.

For so has your life at last

been marked indelibly,

and all your members set

on the path of their translation,

when once you make that choice,

and it is confirmed by those

whose business is to fashion you

according to the great envisioning.

The Decision

The time for whispering ends—

the decision approaches.

Where will you go, my desire, where?

With what hope

might you in trembling venture forth,

a refugee in exile

from out of this heart when I have

sent you away, saying:

Did you forget that you would be

wrested from me in time?

What was intimacy sweet

has soured from this summons.

No longer have you any home here,

nor elsewhere in sight,

yet pray you may be ever welcomed

there where you land!

I shall soon enough hear some news

of your arrival and

that unknown place’s appointment of you,

your new berth,

and then must I decide.

Shall I without sleep launch forth,

without retirement, or shall

my solitude utterly destroy

all that I had hoped beyond hope

for you as sacrifice?

Where, my child, where shall you go?

—if not . . .  à-dieu . . . 

The Teacher

As though in a wind-swept, vasty field

he looked ahead and saw a road for me,

pointed with eyes silent, then turned back;

he left me to follow it on my own.

Now I, in the quickening of his investment,

must walk surely in that direction alone.

Would it not trouble his heart if I did not?

Would I not have betrayed his promise?

But, too, would it not trouble my own if,

when I am gone, he did not e’en once turn

to look after me from afar and smile?

There let his silence compel a vigil of the wind

carrying to me the hopes of untold futures

his because they are mine—him because me!

Old Pine