December 8th

in the room there is a fountain

the water of the word that washes clean

love carved the filigree
opened the stone
and dropped the wall

through partial sight
the cloud revealed
light shining on the water

kneeling down, we saw
minute glints of gold and supple scales,
rocks of muted color shifting
to darkened green within,
where the roots are fed.

this water winds through the trees.

long ago, I saw you in the clearing
you sat amid the shards
turned them over in your fingers

what is underneath now is stone
and roots and living things
bending in the current
the jewel green of all your water

i saw you standing on the moss
light by which there is light,
life
flesh and bone and breath,
the second adam,
the first begotten and eternal word,
smiling
your eyes friendly as a brother

when i found you again, i knew
though i love you, i could
never hold on strong enough-
never make my sight so clear as to compel
you by my flimsy works already rotten
dissolved by the wind and rain

my wings of homespun purity
could only
carry me high enough to melt
drop
the hollow of my hip unhinged
at dawn by the river
where the angel armies danced
in two companies,
coming and going upon the ladder

it must be you that carries me
limping,
dusty from the desert
set me in your arms, sealed and
finish all your works

even for one hour,
you gave us the full wage

who is this
looking forth from resurrection,

radiant from your reflected face,
clear as the sun within and
shining out,
gallant as the whole host of stars,
each a banner lifted
airs above the ground
and planted in loam,
the blade run through, turned up,
risen into tasseled heads of wheat

November 20th

These words aren’t working.
Even when I’m with you, the words stall.
I must offer you my open hands as another offering,
something not visible. I need another language.

the rough weave of your robe with the trailing hem
the glisten of light in your eyes as you turn your head to speak

how you came down off the mountaintop lucent still but willing
to walk into the piercing multitude and despite desperate, uncertain faith,
heal

when you stand unsteady on your feet while he washes his hands,
wait for the spoken verdict while the drops of blood and water
fall

I called and you caused me to know
everything you already taught me
those lessons tumbling back into the place
you never left, but
I love to be invited, you whisper
Though this is a secret you’ve already shared,
I love when you tell it to me.

I never live further away than the reach of your arm
Your heart is my hearthstone, touchstone, pillow
and if my love has any power to compel, I will pull
you toward me each time I sleep, wake, breathe
because you are there now.

Last night when we went to the orchard
the weeds pressed back the door
I had to open it hard over sweet smelling
tuffs of grass, even the trees were overgrown,
mossy. A branch had fallen.

We stood in the midst of this tumbled down beauty,
chiaroscuro traced and living, and it was more lovely
even than before, when I had lain in the grass to
watch the sky falling fathomless between the leaves
and you lifted me up to peer over the wall.

You asked me what I wanted to know.

Though I love that most excellent of songs,
it’s not your poetry that moves me,
it’s not your power or your glory.
It’s that you,
being the manifest image
of the unseen and living God,
sat somewhere near the sea of galilee and said
blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth
in the syllables of an eastern dialect,
your voice filled out by a whole human frame.

I love that you scraped your hand on the wood, sat tired on the well,
You wore your sandals out, stayed up sleepless, went hungry,
scattered the crumbs and compelled the riffraff to the
wedding feast, dismissed herod with vivid curtness
and pressed on toward the perfection of the third day.

It's your calloused fingers curling around the nail as
you die slowly amid the babble of mocking voices
and desperate grief, with the wooden sign inscribed
over the cornerstone.

o my beloved Rabboni,
teach me the language of your kingdom,
reveal your heart from the inside out
and show me again that I live there,
walking with you in the cool of the morning.

July 23rd

Of Broken Bread


In the church of the doubting saint, we all stand.
Behind the stained glass,
lies the garden in the rain, waiting.
Lift up your hearts, he said.
We lift them to the Lord.


The flat bread was lifted up and cracked apart with a snap, his wide sleeves falling down, the polished wooden cross a centerpiece behind him.


Again and again, the priest had declared, you called us into a covenant with you.


Again and again we broke it, crushed your heart in the desert, until in the fullness of time, you sent yourself openly among us, the bared and holy arm of Yahweh a young itinerant rabbi having no beauty that we should desire him, grown up like a weed out of dry ground.


Tear down this temple, you had cried, breath still heaving in you, and I will raise it again in three days.


That wound driven deep in your side by the tip of the spear, wide enough to reach a hand within your body torn open, pierced right up under the ribs to the heart. Bled out, the violence broken through.


In the shadowed synagogue, prayer shawl hiding your head, you sit studying before the scroll. How those words must have opened up in your spirit, stark and terrifying, your life written out.


You whisper, leaning forward, lost in the lines, the lilting, unyielding poetry of the murdered prophets. You are young and unmarked still on an ordinary Sabbath day.


Behold, I come.
In the scroll of the book it is written of me,
I delight to do your will,
oh my God, my God!


The Son of Man indeed goes just as it was written of Him. You are the manifest image looking into the mirror of your own words breathed down though the ages. You are beyond understanding, a secret no longer hidden, a sudden in-breaking, an apocalypse.


My Lord and my God.


I take you from the hand of the priest. I don’t mind the mystery. You break easily in my mouth, washed down by the wine. You are sweet and altogether lovely like sapphire and ivory. You blood burns like fire in me all the way back to the pew, where I want to hide my blushing face behind the hymnal.


In your infinite love, you made us for yourself. Held still and hardly breathing, your hand passes over my face, the hollows of my eyes, my pulse flickering right under your fingers; the same hand that knit me first together. I remember how I am your flesh and blood formed, a part your living temple, your sister, your spouse.


Words can’t hold that meaning, it runs out like water from a broken vessel in braided strings of light, like water from the cleft of the rock, turning the wilderness to flowers, a fountain of gardens. That meaning must be eaten, it must be drunk like new wine in the kingdom of God.


We stand to watch the procession
pass by the baptismal on the way to the open door.
Go in peace to love and serve the Lord, he said, lifting up his hands.
Thanks be to God, we say.


Alleluia, alleluia.

July 16th

The first veil falls much faster than the last.

Sometimes the threshold is enough.

Sometimes I want to make my home on the stone.

On the lee side of the stone, past the pillars,

things become too large for measure.

I live in Georgia now and the cicadas

mark the hours in the evening.

I never see them,

I only hear them calling.

Each evening, you hand me a bouquet

of gilded pine branches caught in the airy

places between the light and the ground.

I accept.

July 9th

Across the butterfly lit
bridge on the bay
are lines of color coming and going
at impossible speeds.

Beams of green corroded steel
are laid to rest beneath in vaulted spaces
floored in gravel and forgotten.

Those pipes they run for miles
head away upstate from the leaking
tiles and no passing lanes.

They bring that water down the mountains
in black corrugated tunnels using
height and gravity.

They run alongside the road rising up
briefly, the unseen water
gathering weight and velocity
before disappearing.


A marvel of engineering
the electric lines bow and bow again,
are lifted up on cross beams
following the road and then multiply,
led away in silent highways
intersecting through the countryside.


In my grandfather’s day they were capped
by pale green glass and the hum could
be heard beneath the thick pine pole,
hot tarred and splintering, impaled
by iron spikes, footholds for
The workmen placed too high for my hands to reach.

That climb impossible to imagine
toward live electricity under the heat of the brush meadow
while a myriad unseen messages ran through,
quick enough to kill.


At night I heard the highway through the trees
Like a live thing whispering.


*


Underneath the constricting bands
of decaying cement roadways,
oil soaked verges, weed wild and trashed,
scourged by the winds of rushing traffic-
Beneath that leached and brittle ground
there is some good soil waiting.


Roofs of housing developments appear
like the spines of books, dripping rain
over cast-off coffee cups and half-full plastic
bottles. The rains fills in the heel prints of
workers pressed to the red mud, small
pools of reflected cloud. Across the road,
neighbors peer through darkened windows,
wondering who has come home to their
happily ever after plot of ground, square
rooms sealed off, vented and cooled,
cut back into the undergrowth, tangled
behind the raw boards of the pine fences.


To go home, we take the quickest route,
on and off again, the car door slamming
night and morning, accumulating the
next thing necessary to smooth, fulfilled
living- five bladed razors, kitchen ninjas
non-stick peelers and waterproof mattress covers,
this season’s colors in small glass bottles
rattling around in bathroom drawers.


We want the family vacations that make
every moment count amid
fabricated characters and
smoothly running machinery.
We want the colorful oversized masks,
the flounced costumes to beacon us
into the good life, the blue hotel pool,
the wide winging sprays of water that encompass
that one breath that tells us
we are here now, but those marks
barely ripple out before
the next comes through
and we are climbing out,
bone sore and weary,
willing to stand in line
for one more time
while the afternoon slides away.


Maybe we will wake one day before the alarm
and see the way the light falls through the drapery
and half awake, remember when we were young
and the backyard alone was a mystery,
spinning out beneath our bare feet,
worlds cool and green and welcoming,
appearing when we paused to look.

April 2nd

-and forget your own people and your father’s house-


those pine branches sweeping down across
the road in winter, black ice rims over water
maples, beeches, whitened birch and hollows
sunk ankle deep in dying leaves


that road was dirt once, cool and smooth
each time ending at the outflow, through
the corrugated pipe, out and under the brick
wall and away into the woods
that corner of the lake small, cold, glimpsed
through the leaves in summer


no further, one way or the other, each ending
at the highway encircling the wide edge
of the lake, where the cemetery was laid
in deep to the hill-
beyond were the towns.


looking back, i saw the long greensward
of home white architecture lifted and that
narrow path i’d trod head down to the task


i saw the sisters holding fast in hope
day dreams fragrant as cranberry blossom
woven into years of childhood
coming to fruition right on that
threshold but

i walked past the stately door thrown open

to the warm sun as all my friends were filtering in
that fall i couldn’t write my name in the lists
i was unraveling that taught restoration
and there was no explanation
possible to bridge the gap increasing
each day although love
wordless made a way later


when i was a girl, i dreamed
sixty fathoms under, rose brier
hearing music sung by flaming tongues
above in the willow and crimson on
the mountainside in autumn


you called me through the hedges
around the water, beyond the dead
and set me before a burning landscape
with every tendril of my hair,
tongue, fingertips tracing glowing ember


still through the cracks showed black
bent wires like elbows not fitting in
the darkness the fire had yet to consume


i thought i would do such great things for you

March 30th

-hear, o daughter, and consider-


all your open invitations falling
like seeds upon unbroken ground
washing up in eddies underfoot
too much a multitude to search through


one i caught midair and kept it


those were the leaf shards
hidden in the jewelry box and crumbling
your invitation like their scent still releasing
each time I opened up  the case


i took it with me when i died


it lived sealed in the storage bins
amid the clutter kept from my childhood


it waited


while i learned the electric letters
of a foreign language, listening
through the glass door to the music
calling the children home


i went west


I lived in ransacked rooms
borrowed rooms, rooms built
on middle class soil in the middle
of small yards and adorned
with surface finishes


still all your open invitations fell through
the maze of those walls in whispers-


I began to consider

March 21st

-turn your eyes away from me, for-

this Living God that is,

          isn’t stone.

i can place before the idol

delicate displays of meat and fruit-

delectable, seared and sacrificed.

open the awning above,

and bow down before

that graven image of god

and chant the flawless rote

to move

that piece of architecture

-ornate or invisible,

personal or patriotic-

i can dial in all those

correct numbers and fill

in all those puzzle perfect pieces

by the ten percent yield

and expect an increase of

myself-

that narcotic to ease

that fat to fill

that distraction of sound

adrenalin, confusion and

loyalty of blood.

All these things each morning

i can be faithful to do

in order to

bring forth

and to hide from and to search out

and to maim that life

that was given.

to place it under stone, but

that Living God that is,

      isn’t stone

and one singular searching glance

silent- still-

can take that divinely beating heart
by storm-

uplift, capsize-

turn fierce and melt away in love.

March 18th

-my beloved has gone down-

down to the tawny field,

the skies above a robin’s egg blue

he has gone down to gather bulrushes and

bunches of those silver tipped velvet willows

to place in wide mouthed clay jars

set on the stone beside the fountain

where the sky is caught in a net of ripples.

down to see if the south side of the hill is greening,

to see those brave faced dandelions

turning toward the sun.

down to the lilies,

finely woven, cool as river rock and smelling of rain.

I have seen him uncurling shy as fern under the bare boughs,

I have seen him passing over the sky in whitened shadows.

and there’ll be

damp footprints over the silvery stone,

the cotton towels shook out to dry.

lady bugs nestled in the windowsills and

lily pads floating in the fountain, some the

seat of solemn, round bellied frogs and

garlands of moss oak hung from the cypress rafters.

March 13th

-Out of the Ivory palaces,

By which they made you glad-

under the shaded portico by the pool

stirred by the angel

they all rush down, singing glory

I was there at the edge, waiting

small, folded in, shoved into

the crack of the wall.

Do you want to get well?

Sometimes you don’t.

Sometimes waiting is all the life

you can manage.

I had decided: I’ll spend

my whole life crippled

warmed by the sun,

watching the rush toward miracles.

It’s not a question of desire, but direction.

There was never any water in that pool for me.

I never belonged to any angel.

I didn’t mind waiting, but when you

knelt down I felt the disjointed breaks

press in.

Why didn’t you come for me

when I was whole?

But when was that?

This disease took hold

before I could speak- I felt it

spreading as I grew.

There was a time when

I was a fool under the apple tree.

You could have had me then.

Wasn’t it all for you?

Who would have guessed

you’d let a cripple in the palace.

In the ivory tower

There’s a sun bleached mat

Rolled up and forgotten in the corner.

August 12th

The Beloved comes home-
     and the rain washes up in billows
     flattening the grasses, leaving glittering
     baubles flung from the roof.

The Beloved comes home-
     and the fire flares up in the hearth
     sending shadows flying to the windows
     draping them with dancing hues.

Oh, dress the table with a coat of many colors!
Lay all those blown glass goblets down,
Let them shatter like light on water-
Let that be a pathway.

I will be dressed in trillium, aster and yarrow
trimmed with lace from the hedgerow
-quick now, shake the lady bugs out-
and snowdrops in my hair.

I hear His footsteps on the threshold
     and the swallows launch, delirious,
     to inscribe the sky with their gladsome falling.

Lift the latchkey
     barely breathing
          my hands all myrrh and honey.

O each time, the first time-
no matter how familiar Your face.

I forgot my veil, my voice, my manners,
I trace those lines, I know that voice-
they tell me what is and was and always shall be.

I laid my heart out for you on our table,
with the broken bread and the bitter herbs
and the best wine saved for last.

Cast the stars in the sky for light,
the crickets will make us music.

Come, lay down beside me,
You sweet One, You Only,
well pleasing, well known.
Lay Your head in my arms,
I'll tell You a story.

I'll weave You a crown of lilies
You'll wear when You're with me-
Your crown of state You'll keep
for more formal occasions-
it doesn't match Your bare feet.

Lay me down to sleep, I pray
the Lord my soul to keep close
all the night long as it passes by
outside our window until I wake beside
Your bright and morning light and
surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life and
I will live here in Your house forever, amen.

August 10th

Each time I see that sunlit amber

I remember, canopied over that

warm earth, around which

everything else turns for me

returning always and again

to that one place where

I first heard my name.

 

I saw your shape in the running

of those shadows over the chill fields,

furrowed and set for winter wheat

but that light, broken out,

was too far away for my taste.

 

I said to myself, these marks on my soul

must be from a severing-

my farewells must be already said.

I must be marked for returning.

 

Those glittering lights, they couldn’t induce me

to join that ringed and tattered circus,

though I saw the billboards standing by the exit,

those streetlights like runway lights

to the caged and waiting.

 

Oh, I waited in the parking lot for a while,

I made a home out of plastic bags and coffee cups.

I lived there long enough to know-

 

Up over the sound barrier and the eight lanes of traffic,

through the bunker and past the power plant, following

the letter you left me in the cumulous

all the way back to the green hills.

 

You know I let the wind blow out all the furniture

We never used most of it anyway.

Only that warm earth, canopied over,

around which everything else turns,

reflections spinning out, like when

you turn your face toward the sunlight.

June 4th

Dynamic Love
by Evelyn Underhill

 

Not to me

The Unmoved Mover of philosophy

And absolute still sum of all that is,

The God whom I adore -- not this!

Nay, rather a great moving wave of bliss,

A surging torrent of dynamic love

In passionate swift career,

That down the sheer

And fathomless abyss

Of Being ever pours, his ecstasy to prove.

 

As the glad river's life

More glad becomes in music of much strife,

So does that spiritual flood

Dashed in full song,

In quick stupendous majesty of joy

The oppositions of the world among,

Come to fair crest in every breaking bud:

Yea, can the very conflict's self employ

A coloured spray of loveliness to fling

Athwart the world-wide landscape on the wing

Of every flying thing.

 

Dynamic love glints gay on the plume's tip

Of fat and restless wrens, tears at the heart

From the divine and vibrant bramble wreathes

That mesh the hedge with beauty. It out-breathes

Fragrances of pure surrender in the smart

Of sacrificial hay-fields. On the lip

Of frail ecstatic poppies it brims up,

As flaming meditations in the soul

Drowsed with deep passion. E'en the narrow cup

Of inconspicuous vervein still the strange

And awful tincture to fulfilment brings:

There doth my Dear pursue his chemic art,

And thence distils the magic of the whole.

For Love is time, succession, ardour, change;

It is the holy thrust of living things

That seek a consummation, and enlace

Some fragment of the All in each fecund embrace

Whence life again flows forth up its endless chase.

 

Love ever moves, yet love eternal is;

Love ever seeks, yet seeks itself to find;

And, all-surrendered to the leman's kiss,

Doth but itself with its own passion bind.

O sacred, ceaseless flow!

O wondrous meeting

Of the unchanging and the ever fleeting,

That still by the sad way of sorriest lust

Confers a secret glory on the teeming dust.

See! by love's loss we find ourselves indeed,

See! the world's death the world's true life doth feed,

And Love dynamic to Love's rest doth go.

May 28th

Some lit cotton gauze lifting

as I sit in the open windowsill.

 

Lost, my breath goes through

first and following after my

fingertips resting, breathing in

lighter than air falling warm

though the fabric. Life knit

into life, stitched by breath,

each layer air, flesh and blood and

soil- this life shot through

with roots and tendrils curling,

and you.

 

So real you’re weather beaten

by dusty wind and sea salt-

finished by that suffering,

and all those scars

by which I know you.

 

In this present life I grew to sleep and

everything real became wrapped up

in a longing too much for hope.

 

Those dreams,

slipping away into my days

were stolen. One by one

I watched them shiver, shower

into glittering air and lose the light

that lit them from below, too

temporary to bear the weight

of your step

which I could feel trembling

all through me.

 

My hopes, too small to contain

you, were turned inside out

to greet you.

 

When I saw you,

I woke and remembered.

May 1st

I always want everything-

to be everything
to do everything

to please everyone

it’s like a bottomless pit that appears
after pulling the curtain back
and you can’t take a step for the darkness
that comes after the light

you- you yourself- were held
right where you were

and even when you couldn’t
you were held

but to step out of that place,
you appear on the edge
of the dark of
doing everything perfectly
that stretches down below you
into everything you want to be and do
for everyone else’s approval
endlessly.

in that moment, wait.

wait and let your eyes adjust after
the light- the light of being loved
that filled you right where you were,
in the moment where you couldn’t

and you will see it’s not a pit
but now it’s an avenue
safely to pass on, 
open to the airy sky on the one side
and smaller rooms to the other

those doors are choices
and you are free to open them,
to see what lies within.

in one was treasured love
in the other, intercessory prayer

in either room, other people
are quietly at work,
but they didn’t mind me
coming in and looking-

they knew that I was searching
they knew the One I was with

i can’t ever be the voice that
says it all perfectly.

i can only be one part of a
larger tapestry.

and when I become present
to my fear,
i can walk right up the stair
and into the edge of the timeless light
and, imperfect,
be held securely.