Complete List of the Poems
Read through all the poems written so far.
Psalm 1—The Infinite Tree
There is a balcony under wisteria;
Up the hillside, across the vineyards,
Past the windmills in Languedoc.
You can see the Pyrenees on a clear day
Across the bright expanse of memory
As one might see heaven
In a vision.
“No one waters the wisteria,” She scoffs,
“That thing has roots in the canal by now.”
I am in a strange land, but the smell is thick
As the petals drop like ripe fruit
That I have never tasted.
The darkling is behind me
And before me, but is not here.
You could be lost here and never know it.
You could hear the whisper of psalms
Until you were ready to begin
What there was to begin.
I came to the valley to dream
And to listen.
The word of God growls and rages.
I writhe and wait.
I moan and meditate and suffer.
I pray the seed’s prayer at night, alone,
Waiting for the infinite tree
To drop its petals into my mouth.
I pray
That I will find water the deeper I go.
Psalm 8—Thistledown The Wind Has Taken
January in England is weeks of rain.
The snowdrops writhe underfoot
And I think about what is real.
O Lord, my Lord,
How bright and vast is your name in all the earth!
When I look at the work of your hands
I see how everything is poised
At the start of its becoming.
Fat mat tongues push up from chill soil
Like a rising from the dead.
Overhead wild and unseen singers in the trees
Chorus and break cover,
As if every leaf became a bird at once.
The wind blows from another land
And the clouds go cartwheeling by.
What am I that you remember me?
Yet you have made me haunted and hallowed,
Branded, bent, and fallow;
Lattice of heartstring and sinew,
A long and weary marionette;
Betrothed of hope
And harlot to the mirror’s glances;
Hawk above, snake below,
Mouse afield and running.
You have given me the terrifying dominion,
Like an ancient king returning from disaster
At night, alone, at cock’s crow
Along the skull’s way, burdened and slipping back,
The sum of things I used things for.
I am thistledown the wind has taken,
Yet the lives of stars are nothing to me.
And you have put all things under my feet forever.
But today is only January in England
Where snowdrops writhe,
And all that is real has come to a point.
O Lord, my Lord,
How bright and vast is your name in all the earth!
Poem for Psalm 14—The Food That Is Eaten In Dreams
“When you comin’ home, Dad?”
“I don’t know when,
But we’ll be together then.”
Cat’s In The Cradle. Harry Chapin.
“You can check out anytime you like,
But you can never leave.”
Hotel California. The Eagles.
I.
The door opened and the house
Smelled of colitas and embers.
A woman waited there. She was barely clothed.
She took a stub from the sevenbranched candelabra and said,
“Choose your breakence; everything here is free.
You can dance in the courtyard with the others,”
She gestured to bodies
That spun like ghosts above our heads
Beneath the mirrors in the coffered laquearia.
“You can climb the pyre
To find yourself flying in the fire.
Or you can talk and eat and enjoy yourself.”
She handed me pink champagne on ice.
I didn’t dare take it.
“I came for my father,” I said.
She walked me to the booth where he waited.
He didn’t look up when I sat down,
But started talking.
“I had a vision once.
Three men appeared
At the foot of my bed and
One said, ‘You are released.’”
“What does it mean?” I asked.
He shrugged, “I don’t know.
The universe does not explain itself.”
There was a piano playing itself in the corner,
But we weren’t listening.
He tipped an oyster into his mouth and
put his arm around me.
I pulled away, but couldn’t break his grip.
“Now that you’re here,” he said
Let me whisper how the world is.
When the pain years set in,
And the nights of fever dreams come,
You will learn a lot about evil
In the memories of my methods.
But be careful. There are deep games played
In the lightless corners of the mind.
You’re like to go missing
In your sleep.”
He tapped my forehead with the hand
That held his cigar. Ashes fell down my face.
“Touching those days
Will be like touching a snake.
But you know what, m’boy?
It doesn’t matter where it came from.
It is still your snake.”
He laughed as though he’d made some joke.
“The riverboat sails for New Orleans.
Come with me and I promise
You will understand every one of my choices.
We will struggle to feel things, but
We will have the food that is eaten in dreams.
Take my advice: tomorrow may be too late
For your last supper. Take your filling now.”
He slid the plate in front of him toward me.
“We can fly away like things do
When they want to become something else.
Freedom or fidelity?
It is a gamble either way.”
I nodded.
His words were only mirrors,
But they were the fear
That runs like a song every day in my head.
I fled.
II.
I found a gate unguarded
And stumbled into a garden.
I heard something in the dark,
“Who’s there?”
I could almost make out a figure,
Like a king that’s dead, a ghost.
“If thou has any sound or use of voice,
Speak to me,” I shouted.
And this is what it said:
“It is a frayed world and I can see
Your edges ripple and snap.
I know how young you are.
I know your father is in the wind
While you are in the water.
Nobody’s son and nobody’s daughter.”
It cupped my chin and lifted my eyes.
Its hands were cold but solid.
“I know you thought there would be a voice
That said, ‘I am here. You are here.’
But instead, you have been alone
In the strange expanse of the present
You have the sense of moving at speed,
But you don’t know where.”
Then he lifted something and shook it at me.
“I have a gift to give you,” the figure said.
“This is a black bag for you to carry.
It holds only terrifying things
That should not have happened.
Reach into it every day
And eat what you find there
Until the bag is empty. Then
You will find inside it
Treasure for anyone who asks.”
He tossed it at my feet like a snake.
I didn’t want to touch it.
“Here is a prophecy. Keep it with you also.
There is a bench at a beach on a cliff above the sea
That awaits you somewhere. There is a distant morning
When you find the bench and watch the gulls
Wheel and dive. It is January
When the snowdrops writhe underfoot
And you think about what is real.
You will know where you are, and
How you came to be there.
That morning is a cold, clear cutting.
When it finds you, it finds you out.
You are exposed
And it will not matter at all.
Until then, you will need your sad things.
Do not send them away.
You are your father also.
Hidden in the gift is the pain.
Hidden in the losing is another life.”
Then the cock crew
And it was gone.
III.
The ghost receded and my father
Appeared out of the darkness.
I said to him, “Things happened while you were gone—
Things you weren’t there for.
In the silence of memory
I can see how much was wrong.
But what I can’t see is
Why the lie lasted so long?”
“Do not ask questions
If you don’t want answers,” he warned.
Something had happened to him
In the time that we were apart.
His shoes were gone. He was balder.
His eyes shined like opals.
He held his limbs with care,
As if they were made of jagged coral
And might snap off.
“Do you remember when you took us
To her house. You put the TV on and went upstairs
With her, up the spiral staircase.
Surely now you know
You were not upstairs at all.
You were downstairs
Behind us as we watched cartoons
Eating us one by one.”
“One day you will understand,”
He said and fell silent.
He watched the trees around us
For some sign.
“You thought a healing would come—
Your little angry ones,
Were resilient, after all.
But those days were a seed
That only yielded its fullness in time.
We took it and ate of its fruits.
What you didn't know, you chose.
What you didn't eat, we ate.
What you spread out in ruin, we built our ruins on.
The fathers ate sour grapes
And the children were pressed to wine.”
Then he asked me,
“Ok, what does closure look like?
What do you need?”
I answered, “Become a completely different person.
Settle your bulk down in the chair of faith.”
That drew a laugh from him.
“Repent thou, for the kingdom of heaven is near!”
“Is it so much to let
Belief take hold of you?” I asked.
“You would have me cast my lot in with God? That ghost?”
He laughed again with wide, wild eyes.
“I followed him once. It availed nothing.
We are still in rat’s alley.
Where the dead men made dice from their bones.
Time still tumbles pips up
And he holds the rattle bag.
He takes and takes and takes.
We are such things as fire and powder.
You call me Saturn, but
Christ burns, kid. We he consumes.
So shall I play chess with my misery and wait
For a knock upon the door?
Shall I wait for the violent ends
of these violent delights? I think not.
What if there is no shore, no seaside,
But only the darkness that laps at love like the tide?
What if there is only
A vast and birdless silence?
Would you make the exchange
To be there when the sky opens?
To be carried across the chasm
On a rainbow bridge?”
“Yes,” I answered
And I thought that it was true.
He flicked his hand to dismiss
My thought and its easy form.
“I should have been a pair of ragged claws.
Time heals nothing.
The past only becomes a grinning skull.”
The sky was lightening and I could see
He was half gone already, half hollowed,
Half faded into the dream kingdom,
The sound of something in the
Surrounding forest startled him
And he stood up.
“We have come to the end
of our time together, I am afraid.”
His eyes were fixed in the darkness
At something only he could see.
“Good night, sweet prince.”
Then he was gone.
He was wrong about the vision.
The meaning to me was clear.
Psalm 19—The Word in the Wind
Every night the sidelong hip of the Milky Way
Shows itself to you. You see
Backward across miles and years
Along the light of the works of the Almighty.
The earth at your feet is fruitful, wild, and weary.
The wind behind you, now at your face
Blows from another land
Which you have never heard of,
Which you are unequal to.
The sky and the screaming birds
And all the fullness therein say:
Holy, holy, holy.
Why do you wander pathless
In the mountain range of your feelings?
Why do you tremble at all your hidden faults?
Why have you passed so much time afraid?
If you would have light and heat,
Why are you not more in the sunshine?
If you would see the glory of God,
Why are you always elsewhere?
If you would hear the word in the wind,
Face the stars and wait.
Even now your chest, your ribs,
These rafters, this cathedral,
Fills with the breath that made it.
Even now God’s ways wait whole and unmarred
Drawing you back—
You do not need to fill your hopes alone.
The birds at dawn are enough.
The way the leaves are green is enough.
The slim wafer of the present is enough.
Psalm 22—The Chasm and the Passage
My God, My God,
You are the sparrow’s fall
And the flower’s garments.
You are the hallowed hammer
And the hanging tree.
I am poured out like water.
Why have you forsaken me, my father?
Yet surely I was cast on you from birth.
From the ordinary altar of my mother’s womb
You have been my God.
You are the light’s benediction
And the silent sky,
Both the chasm and the passage.
Mine is groan and parting.
Yours is the silence between stars,
Yet you are my canticle and call.
You are unyielding.
I am cross-hearted and heaving.
You have pierced my hands and feet,
Yet as long as light has walked between stars
You have been my God.
You tell the sun your grief
And darkness dances across the noon.
I am the veil, gripped and rended,
In the dark until the dying is ended.
All who cannot keep themselves alive
Will kneel before you.
You have been my God.
You shake the shattered earth of its ancient dead.
You are the breath in buried chests
Who rise and walk and praise you again.
I am the fountain found
I am the holy wine swallowed down.
I am trussed and scattered.
As grapes are crushed, I stagger.
Though creatures of the dark gods
Swirl and encircle me,
And trouble is near,
And the lamb is arrayed
Against the beasts again,
I will find your face
For you have been my God.
You dreamed of flesh in the ground, growing.
For you are the God of scattered seed.
But now I am kernel crushed
Chaff blown, flayed and flying.
I am the flesh you dreamed of dying.
Why are you so far from saving me?
I can count all my bones.
My heart melts. I lay in the dust.
As long as the afflicted have lifted prayers to you,
You have been my God.
Mine is the skull’s way where
All that is crushed, is crushed.
What must be carried, is borne,
And all that can die, is sent to the tomb to wait.
I am the holy bread, chewed and eaten.
I am the Prince of Peace crowned and beaten.
Psalm 29—My God, My Whisper of Flame
I.
These three years the pain hasn’t lessened
But it visits me less. In Geneva,
Men gave their dogs my name to kick them.
I was hit with a bottle,
But do not know who threw it.
When the children found me
On the way to chapel, they made small jokes
Like those a razor makes.
There were always anxieties buzzing
Like flies. I waved them away
And they returned in the wake of my hand.
I was never good at hiding what I suffered.
My head ached continually. I barely ate.
At night I dreamed I was carried to the pulpit
But could find nothing to say.
Though I never doubted your love,
And cast myself upon your word,
I moved from fear to fear to fear.
When those same people knelt
To take the bread and wine
It was my own bloodcoin I gave them.
I placed the bread in their mouths
As my own flesh.
They cursed me and thrived.
They dipped their fingers into my wounds
And mourned and hated me for it.
Repentance ran like quicksilver
From house to house those years.
Men swore themselves to Christ.
Everywhere things burst to life.
But I was cast out.
II.
In Strasbourg, you have been generous.
I live beside the baker and his bread wakes me
Through the window every morning.
The coffee is here. My books are here.
I can write. The room is quiet.
Beyond the room, Idelette is making breakfast.
Her children call me father. In the garden,
We have laid bulbs in the ground
And they will soon return, first the snowdrops,
Then daffodils, then crocuses, then all the others
Until we cut the last blooms in late Summer.
In the afternoon, I will have a glass of wine and walk.
In the evening, I will preach again
And pray with my small congregation
Of Frenchmen who have also fled here.
I do not know if this peace is a reward
Or a punishment for having suffered
And wanting it to end.
I gather it with both hands nonetheless
And wait for it to grow, like the flowers.
III.
When the letter from Geneva came,
I prayed and could not sleep.
I paced in the garden behind the house.
I raised my empty hands to you and fire fell
On the small maple I planted three years ago,
But it did not burn.
I staggered back, “My God,
My whisper of flame,” I begged.
“Send another.”
I came to myself on the ground,
Thrumming, shoeless, dazed.
The dawn was rising, but
All the birds had gone silent.
I heard a voice call my name
And turned but no one was there.
I answered, “Here am I.”
Things inside me stilled
And I thought: enough.
Psalm 32—Deep Heaven’s Diagonal Plumb
Grace, the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
Rib-raising wind, noonday darkness,
Raven’s food and feather and fall,
Deep heaven’s diagonal plumb,
Hound in field and fox in flight,
Storm’s summons and rebuke,
The air of a distant planet, priceless, costless,
A kind of crossing all things feel and fear
Relief, release, consolation, wonder
Farther than eye can see, heart hope, tongue tell.
Long watch at the wayward way, ring and robe,
Far way round and the first home,
Light’s long walk between stars come,
Land of spices; something understood.
Psalm 34—Listen For The Sound Of Water On Rocks
Miranda, today
You walk with the king your father
His hand on your shoulder,
And it is impossible to say
Who is guiding whom.
I, Prospero—who has raised you on these rocks,
Refugee of an alien fullness,
Of another kingdom beyond the chasm, lord of all things
Lost to the storm and to the water— declare,
The fragile shelter we built was real,
But still was not enough to resist
Time’s sinuous tide.
It has brought us fate’s flotsam as from a disaster
Which marks the ending of all we have known.
I can keep you no longer.
Miranda, I know
Things will happen to you
When I am not there. I know
The times you will flee the tempest
And run into its embrace.
But do not pursue the flight from feeling,
The spirits of the air that make you sleep.
Though you press your image
In the mirror and it returns the gesture,
Do not give yourself to the mirror maze. But wait
As we waited these years for the other power,
Unwritten in my books of spells,
To find you.
I—Prospero, wizard of wave and wind, declare:
When you move beyond
The compass of my waning kingdom;
When Milan and its effervescence
Come to claim you;
When the pain years set in,
The nights of fever dreams;
When you are visited as by ghosts
Who whisper how it was and wasn't;
Remember: What is to be born,
Must be carried to term.
Walk through the midnight lanes of memory
And listen for the sound of water on rocks.
Seek all that I taught you, for which you were not ready.
The plain world is deeper than it seems and thicker.
The lives of stars are nothing to you.
This the tempest exposes.
My daughter, the end discloses everything.
Your demons are not all that follows you.
Let us pray.
Psalm 42—Where Light From Light Is Separated
They are parted
As in a cathedral
When one wanders on, lost to sight,
And one lingers back
Under the ancient window where
light from light is separated.
He was used to the oursness of here.
Now her voice hushes through the clerestory.
He is splintered in roselight—
Scarlet, gold, and cerulean
Pour over the stones. Suddenly,
He is thinking of the shaft of a spear,
A darkling crown, blood, and water.
He trembles in the light and is pierced.
He says aloud, “There are months still.
Surely there are days still!”
He thinks of the time she asked, “Is it safe?”
And he said yes.
They both knew it for what it was:
Not what she asked for,
But not nothing either.
One flesh, they used to joke,
But it was a real magic.
More was given than could be gathered.
More was hoped than mind tried,
Or dream guessed, or hands could hold.
Everything seemed to promise so much,
But none of it could be kept.
He inhales and waits and feels the light.
The echo of her voice dances somewhere.
Psalm 46—The Silence Between Breaths of Bellsong
For L’Abri
God, I would walk with you again
Through the high heather. That Autumn
I traced a path through the garden
While I prayed and fretted and watched
The leaves go bright as pennies.
The late roses filled with early snow
And all the stars that ever were wheeled overhead
As your ghost moon tumbled through the sky.
I did not suspect as I huddled with the others
And complained playfully about the cold
That love had become nearly itself.
I wondered and wonder still
As I gave and took, missed and was missed:
Is there another goodness in life than this?
God, we came to the house for different reasons
And the same. One came to hold the coal,
To feel the firekiss for himself.
Another to run the river ankle-deep,
Hip-deep, head under and spinning.
One came to kneel where prayer had been valid.
Another to hire himself, like a lost son,
To the fidelities he abandoned.
One came to hear the sound of birds
In a draughty church in the silence
Between breaths of bellsong.
Another ran for the city of refuge
To take stock, to pay the cost, to hold fast,
To find himself and be lost at last.
God, that Autumn I fell asunder.
Everything lives where the river goes,
And I lived too, but first I took a mortal wound.
I learned it is the space where the emptiness is
That the Lord wants as his own.
Frayed and scattered, I staggered.
I opened my hands and received back
The years the darkling had eaten.
I opened my mouth and took
Deep heaven’s snowflake bread,
Costless, priceless, costing everything.
I was pierced as Christ was pierced.
Then, broken and sated,
I prayed and laughed and waited.
Psalm 51—Gather Me Together, Lord, If You Are There
You sit at the big bay window
In the house where you grew up
And watch the lights of the city.
You sip whiskey and count things:
The years of violence you did against your own self;
The cold concatenation of the fears you mistook for virtues;
The parade of things you used things for;
The years you were always elsewhere
And always regretting it;
The creatures in cages
that were once your dearest prayers;
“O God,” you say to the night outside,
“Have mercy on me.”
You know that you have been a man of strings
Pushing through a hedge without end,
Stranded, strangled, and caught.
You have known so many disasters
That found you without warning or herald or witness.
And though they were a long time ago,
You can still find them inside you.
You still wander through them like old ruins,
Old choices you can’t escape.
“Cleanse me and I will be cleansed,”
You ask without hope.
You can see that you are losing ground,
And every redoubt is only another retreat.
“Wash me and I will be whiter than snow.
Or leave me alone to go on loving my vices.”
You are doing it again—
That old thing you conquered
Again and again and also left free.
You buried it under the garden behind the house
Where you planted the black roses last year.
“You will find it there, my God,” you say,
“Along with all the other loves
that lost me all I wanted.
If you can, Lord, hide your face
From my empty renunciations.”
More and more you struggle to feel things.
Inside yourself you sense the failing light, the emptying tide,
The tumbling glass, the hissing sand,
The endless internal slipping into the sea.
And everywhere the void inside you yawns wider
And you wonder if there is anything that can’t slip inside.
At the precipice, you say aloud,
“Gather me together, O Lord,
If you are there.”
You tried so long to devote yourself
To the fidelities you cherished.
It seems to you now there are so many reasons to believe,
And so many reasons to throw it all away.
You watch at the chasm of all your flown things
And wait for your old loves to return,
Like birds to eat from your hands:
Your gentleness, your quiet, the stillness
You spent so long running from.
You find yourself asking,
“O God, be my first and last love and only.”
Psalm 53—Two Coins for the Ferryman
There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun.
It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy
And me, O God, for one.
-The House of the Rising Sun, Traditional Folk Ballad
I.
The door opened and the dancing girls came,
The music and the performers, the bodies
Spun in the tempest, hardly touching.
Ghosts moved in masquerade.
And I am one.
Every room was glass and flashing,
Every face a distant star.
There was acceleration
And flickering and fever.
The falling bodies spun
Like dark dust sifting
And I am one.
The piano played itself in the corner
And everyone danced
But no one was listening.
Someone grabbed my face and kissed me.
I wanted to ask if the end had come,
Was yet to come, or was here among us?
I wanted to ask:
If these were the voices
Of my dead friends or
Just the gramophone?
There was a man next to me at the bar
With a cigarette in his lips
And a pile of burnt ends beneath his chair.
He introduced himself as my guide.
“With such deep games played
In lightless corners, one must be careful,”
He said, “You’re like to go missing
In your sleep.”
He bent close to me to confide,
“The fear isn’t believing nothing,
but in coming to believe such horrible things,”
(At this he gestured around him at the house)
“as though they were nothing.
It is the silent, internal slipping that gets you—
down the crapper with the rest of time.”
He winked as though he had imparted something important.
“It doesn’t matter
If you serve the Red Rose of York,
Or the White Rose of Lancaster.
The passage is the same:
Two coins for the ferryman.”
He lit another cigarette with the last bit of the old one
He stank the way a drunk stinks.
I listened to his words,
But could only hear
A loud noise coming from inside me
Reciting the words that everyone who is lost knows:
I am alone.
I am alone.
I am alone.
I fled.
II.
I stumbled into a garden
And shut the door on the distant music.
A man was there, kneeling.
I asked him, “Do I know you?”
And this is what he said:
“We are on the high wire now. And tumbling.
Every line is bent, trussed, and scattered.
I know how young you are.
I know you have feared all the wrong things.”
He laid his open palm on my chest
And felt the fear flutter there.
I bowed myself beside him.
“I know it seems there are so many reasons to believe,
And so many reasons to throw it all away.
Be patient with all that is unanswered
Inside your soul.
The only thing left is not something you will do;
It is something that will happen to you.
You are caught in something irreversible,
And the only way out is through.
The answer to suffering is not an answer,
But an experience.”
I felt nauseous and I tried to stand.
He glanced at the door.
“The end is here, and the son of man is delivered.”
III.
The entrance to the garden opened
And a loud parade flowed into the silence.
Many voices sang together:
“To live is self,
To die is unthinkable,
So we will take our sin in sips.
We have gathered our petty kingdoms,
But it is your universe, so we will wait
If you stagger to the skull’s place.
Come, shaker, rattle us down.
Christ the ridiculous,
Take your crown.”
One man broke off from the rest
And grasped the kneeling stranger
And kissed him, saying,
“Thou my God,
I would pry open your inner parts
And swallow you down with sauces
As one eats an oyster.”
The stranger pulled away but couldn’t
Break the man’s grip so he cried
And held onto his captor,
Who continued relentlessly:
“The sight of you repulses me.
Where is the knowledge I bargained for?
God, my God. Come,
Let us reason together.
Did you not make eyes
To look around? This mouth
To swallow down?
These reticulated fingers
To take and take and take—
First a little, then a lot, then everything?”
Someone raised their voice over the din and said,
“We have come to the end
of our time together, I am afraid.”
They lifted the stranger and dragged him away.
The speaker continued,
“This is bitter business.
Now cracks a noble heart.
Good night, sweet prince. Good night.”
He said and wiped away an imaginary tear.
The rest is silence.
Psalm 73—We Laughed as Loud and as Wild as We Would
Next to the lives we might have had
I can see we’re losing ground.
As for me, my feet almost stumbled
When we juggled for God and everyone laughed.
We tumbled. We were picked last.
We held fast. We slipped back.
We waxed rhapsodic as our losses gained.
We were the kernels crushed before the grain.
We knew the pleasure of hardship
That is not the pleasure of pain.
Our flesh and our hearts sickened.
We were vulnerable, hoping,
Toiling at follies and stricken.
But so what?
It was good.
So what if we found treasure
And left it lying on the ground?
So what if we offered without measure
To whoever was around?
So what if we lent more than we got;
If we didn’t get back the things that we lost;
If we used our best
And they broke the whole lot?
It was good.
So what if we gathered to pray and only bled?
And felt dark crowns twist down on our heads?
We could have kept ourselves from sorrow,
And hoarded today against tomorrow.
We could have avoided all the pain,
But instead, we found the dying
That comes before life is taken up again.
We drank the cup. God filled it up.
It was good.
So what if we had a lot to learn?
So what if there was much to forgive?
We bore everything that was carried to term.
We carried what there was to bear.
We forgot whatever there was to forget.
We shared whatever we had to share.
We tumbled and slipped and danced together.
It was good.
So what if we failed to guard our time?
And said our piece in simple rhymes,
And laughed as loud
And as wild as we would?
It was good.
So what if we promised
More than there was to give?
So what if we gave more
Than it took to live?
So what if we loved and lost
More than we thought we could?
It was good.
It was good.
It was good.
Psalm 84—The House of Many Rooms
Let me show you our customs here.
There is tea at 11:00 and 4:30,
There are the spines of books and milk in coffee,
Voices heard from other rooms,
Cool cotton sheets and birds at all hours,
Old wood without memory,
Matins sung in sunlight on surfaces
And other masks magic wears
As it plays across the ordinary altars you have made.
There is a welcome, again—
Even the sparrow finds a home,
And the house martin a nest
As she follows the long path inside herself
Back to the place she belongs and longs for.
There is the temple, which was always only
Your two cupped hands.
There are gossamer flung prayers
That flash to the vast invisible.
There is the wind from before time
That makes flesh of fleshless.
There are questions that come like light
Across the floor at dawn
When you realize you already know
The stranger walking next to you.
There is the slim wafer of the present
Open your mouth
Body of christ
Amen
Psalm 86—The Years You Were Always Elsewhere.
When the snow fell
You forgot the lake was there,
And walked out onto the ice.
You looked back
at the house with all its lights.
As the cracks started to show themselves
and you didn’t want to leave.
You laid down
As a man who has seen the angel,
As death itself.
In the cold glass your own rumpled image
Pressed its cheek to yours
to whisper something
About the shards it had become,
About the rainbow bridge that passes out of seeing,
You saw the things beneath the ice:
The flotsam of your renunciations.
So much debris from old disasters
That found you without warning or herald or witness.
The years you were always elsewhere
And always regretting it.
The years the distance only grew between things
Though you tried to devote yourself
To the old fidelities you once believed.
So much lost to the water.
You pawed at the ice,
But you couldn’t reach any of it.
You shouted: “Come back! Come home!”
You promised your whole remaining days
If only everything would fly back to you
From the far side of the chasm.
You tried to stand.
The cold had you now.
You remembered
What you needed to remember too late:
You had already wagered everything you had
Out there on the ice.
Psalm 88—Panicseed Sprouted Everywhere
The fever year began
Between two cars of a train.
I pressed my hand to the wall and rattled.
Fear thundered in me. Midnight passed.
Panicseed sprouted everywhere.
My heart paced the beat beat
Beat of things going faster.
I thought: What is happening?
I thought: Send it back. I don’t want it anymore.
That year I lay in bed and sweated.
I slept with rosary beads,
But couldn’t remember why.
My prayers were all gasping.
The waltzing clock tripped madly on
And I rasped across the pitted contours of
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
I made coffee and watched videos
Of people driving snow plows
At night on empty highways.
I went out for cigarettes
And came back to shiver in bed.
I woke at night chasing
The tail end of dreams, tasting blood
And it tasted the way fear tasted.
This is what it has come to.
I kept taking shallow breaths.
I kept thinking: Trashfire and oblivion.
To ash. To ash. Away.
The bells of that year rattled things awake.
The present dissembled while
The future wrung its hands and
The past stood up like a dead man
From its shallow grave,
Hastily dug, filled with wrath.
But I didn’t understand any of it.
Lives I didn’t know I’d lived returned,
Things I couldn’t believe I’d said,
Things that I always thought had happened
To someone else.
I thought: My God,
I never knew I had lost so much.
My friends shunned me. I blackened.
I writhed and waited for the return
Of the things I lost to the water.
I was humbled, violate, sepulchral. I raised
My hands but nothing took them.
I was a spinning marionette,
Limbs flung, a hungry ghost
In the tempest reaching
But never touching.
I cried out day and night,
But was only flayed.
People asked me what was wrong
When the face that wore my face made a smile.
When they noticed the thing that watched them
From the dark points of my eyes.
I reassured them, but what I didn’t say was:
“It is a long way back if you get lost.”
And: “There were moments that it seemed OK,
But those were the moments when it all went wrong.”
And: “Where were you when the dark
Chewed away at the colorful dream?”
God, in those days I hardly knew
What it meant to be crushed.
But that is when I learned.
I hoped for all the wrong things
And got what I hoped for.
I feared all the wrong things and fled them.
I was never living but ever hoping to live.
I see now like I never did.
I have spent so much time afraid.
I wished for something else
And clutched what I had with bleeding hands.
My happiness was all glass.
I prayed to be thrown aloft like thistledown
But only laid abed and sweated
And worried at the promises of the Almighty.
How I wanted the year to change,
The dead to rise and run,
The darkling to pass. Instead,
The sorrow wasn’t stopped.
When I heard wind chimes,
When I smelled woodsmoke,
When I saw the snowdrops in the snow,
My hands tingled and I had to sit down.
The panic flared and I covered my face.
I kept trying to recover.
I kept trying to breathe.
Nothing took.
Nothing answered back.
The dark abides.
Psalm 137—The Vulture Sky
I.
They came to Nyamata 10,000 wide
In search of a place to hide.
They died.
Our guide mimed taking a child by its legs
And sweeping it like a broom
At the low brown mark on the wall.
Until we understood the crescent stain
Was brains. I fled.
You can come and see - your
self, the skulls, the dust, the clothes,
the bullet holes, the pocked walls, the bits of bone -
where the murdered hid.
I did.
II.
The vulture sky
was dark and heavy.
The wolf fate
was fat and ready.
The bird of peace
was up and gone.
(She didn’t return before the dawn.)
The dogs of conscience
watched the show
and inside 10,000 people waited
for snake night
to swallow them whole.
III.
If what happened to me
Had happened to you,
How would you have survived it?
Why should I not rage at my killers? And rage
And rage and rage?
Why do the wounds remain
So long after they have passed,
Yet kindness is as fleeting as birdshadow?
Is the house of my anger real enough to live in?
Why should I beautify the place of my exile?
How much will it cost when the darkling comes due?
What would I do
If my enemy were here before me
In a land without law
Or consequence?
The questions clatter in my mind’s mouth.
They combust. They cut. I shout.
I chew them. I sicken.
I cannot spit them out.
IV
Other memories are flames, like the time
You accidentally burned the boy.
He rolled on the ground and shouted
but it went on burning.
And you realized: they were lying.
It doesn’t go out.
It wants to be remembered.
Oh, yes indeedy, it is always
On its way back.
You wake at night convinced you need to run.
You are already out of bed.
”Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Help me!”
Your wife says: go back to bed.
It is just the radiator.
Go to sleep. It is just the train.
But you know
Somewhere in the room, the snake is hiding.
Somewhere the boy is still burning.
Somewhere 10,000 people press together.
It is all happening again.
Psalm 142—Be Still Or Be Scattered
The glacier is still a river
The icefall still falling water.
The snow covers but does not fill
The cracks. The ice is so blue
It is black.
You are there alone, alive,
Improperly roped. Your compass
Spins at this latitude.
The snow suggests no path. The way is any way
but back.
You don’t know how you came here,
Stunned, stuttering, concussed with cold. You were
Lost loving the glamour of things.
You didn't know you should have kept your time. How long?
And now it is gone.
You begin to suspect you feared
The wrong things and laid down in the wrong hopes
Like they were snow, to die. The Fear
You fled has known this place. You step
Carefully to its embrace.
The ice is thin. The air is thin. The very mountains
Have gone thin. The rainbow bridge ripples
Gossamer and glowing. Even a careful step
Could make all you once were shatter. It is be still
Or be scattered.
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