the deepening ground

Last week we returned to St. Paul, Minnesota for the national speech and debate competition hosted at the University of Northwestern. While there, I got to spend some quiet time on the dual bench glider swings on the university’s small island, known for its Island Chapel (follow the link beneath the photograph for the chapel’s history). However, before sitting to rest in the quiet, I explored the path that outlined the island where I got lost in the “peace of wild things,” as Wendell Berry would say.

While I enjoyed the flora and fauna, I also carried the weight of loss. A student who graduated from Grove City College with my son just last month had unexpectedly passed away. I did not know Khush well, but recalled stories my sons told, and I know I met him at least once while my boys were in college. Still, the sudden loss of life hit me harder than I expected. Memories of our previous visit to UNW in 2017 resurfaced and I pondered how this island allowed me to time travel, in a sense. Here in the present I was connected to the past and, through what I would pen, I reached into the future as well, imagining those who would read this poem and see these images in time-yet-to-come.

Therefore, may this poem be what Andrew Peterson referenced in his work, The God of the Garden, when he quoted songwriter Pierce Pettis: one of the “‘little envelopes of light’ along the path, waiting to be found by the lonely traveler” (Peterson 79).

Island Chapel

By Vincent H. Anastasi 2025

This small island crowned
with its own small chapel,
whose watery narthex houses lilies
on the brink of bloom,
teased me along its paths
until I spied a mallard
drinking and preening on a drowned log
while an unseen Canada goose
called from the middle of the lake,
its voice wrapping around the island
as memory wraps around a place.
In a split-second splash, a fish leapt
from its natural element then disappeared
before I could confirm its existence.
I have stopped to snap photos
of a solitary ox-eyed daisy
and the four-petaled Harlequin Blueflags.
I've traced the downy woodpeckers'
invisible brushstrokes on blue sky.
I've paused to live in the vibrant stillness
of an island sanctuary in June.

But the gossamer veil between life
and death has been torn
by the sudden nature of unexpected loss.
It has left me raw.
Yet here I defy death,
here I return to my mind's island
where my daughter and sons
stood before this chapel door,
where we watched the red-eared sliders
sun themselves on the slowly decaying logs,
where we played together in the shallow waters.
We are all eight years younger
and Khush is still alive (though unknown to us),
and my dear friend Bill is still alive,
and we do not know the earth-stopping fear
of loss and loss's grim harvest,
nor our misguided attempts to stave death off.
Here in this place, I transcend time's finite bands
holding hands with past and future in the living present.
Here I leave one of those "little envelopes of light
along the path, waiting to be found,"
a key that unlocks the chapel
that adorns the small island of the soul.
Here lilies bloom perpetual
and we all sit crowned with life eternal.