H’Shem has never trapped my tears in angel bottles
or bedewed my bed with bread at dawn
or shepherd-walked me past His glassy ponds
and yet where Bethlehem breeds barley
I grow grey, and sing my vows.
I vow to help. To ease your years
and wash your baby’s ears. Around your flocks
I’ll sleep and someday sleep perpetually
where stones are stacked on stones
to mark old sites where stories named your fields.
I vow my promises are stones.
What tales bereft of promises deserve the name of story?

A vigilant monk is a fisher of thoughts.
He stares into his mind’s lagoon
To paw those fishies up as soon
As they flash silver or disturb the pond
With fins a-flicker when they crack
His dark with flirts of light. But day
He doesn’t need. Or meat. He’ll pray
Their mouths hide coins enough to pay
His master’s taxes. The poor? Tossed back.

Lord, many sent much to your feast.

Angels sent their shepherds, burlap-boned,
Reciting Glorias to soothe their sheep
That hemorrhage for sins would soon be stippled dry.

But Herod sent his wizards, masked as friends
To woo a baby king. Then razors. To filet sweet limbs.
(The ego of a king is like a lion claw.)

You! You sent your ghouls into the queen’s boudoir
To howl her dreams, as to her man
She forged a ransom note from god.

You! You hold monopoly on vengeance
And I think that’s right. So let him die
Sensate. So let him die sensate.

O night of miracle atrocities!
O Lord do stalk your crowns with wonders
And with justice all at once.
So heavy should enchanted lands weigh bloody hands.

R = Reader
C = Congregation 

R: In dreams I hear them singing.  

               C:  Come to me.  

R: Some dreams I'd like to stop.   

               C:  If you are weary. 

R:  Some dreams my feet won't run.

               C:  And heavy laden. 

R:  Some dreams my grades are bad. 

               C:  I'll give you 

R:  Dreams.   And I will give you 

All:  Rest.   

Hypostases: there must be three,
Since dyads, lacking we, must always come undone.
There must be three, for each enactment of the joy
Must be in turn rejoiced (or what’s it for?)
And joy itself must be itself adored
As slowly as omnipotence allows,
by gestures of high court,
but all competing for the helpmeet role.

There must be one, each living in the seamless ground
For there is nothing each would claim to own
And yet, when all is done, there’s nothing lost
Since they knew nevertime when ought.

Yet these are simply structures of our thought.
Which is to say, the three and one are closer than myself.

So now, about your three-or-one: I simply
See no reason to replace a thought with thought
When both seem dear. I’ll have my cake
And eat it too, or what’s it for?

Good morning: sit, and bring your friend.
Or what’s our table for?

I can’t recount my movements.
My memory’s milk-blurred,
My corneas are blinked with milk
and slurried milk and honey
furs my tongue on waking
as I lick a bruise inside my thumb.

My palm still feels a hilt.
Along my brow I find
a fingered cross in honey
and I find I’m born amnesiac,
indicted, that I must have done
that thing that hurt that lamb.

Green:    The sheen persimmons leave on teeth.
Red:        The stripe when rhubarb’s ripe.
White:    When heifer pails her milk.
Red:        Her teats when city cousins try.
Black:     The snake who spooks the dogs.
Red:         The largest crawdad’s claws.
Silver:     A boy should own a knife.  And keep it sharp.
Red:         The yard where chickens died.
Violet:     Porch, and whispers. Night.
Red:         The coals that pink our dark.

My father, from his hospice bed, looked off into the distance and led a church service for an unseen congregation.  I scribbled down his words and phrases as he moved in and out of coherence.   After this,  no more words.  He died a day later. 

So son, now come on up and sing, we’ll wait.
My breathing spell is cracked. We run the show
and not the angels, though. I love your songs.
Did I misuse the privilege to call on you?
In disregard, in deadly disregard?

Are all the speakers working? And the tapes?
My son will lead our dedication of this space
with such an instrument. Just take your place
and bring the love of God because we’re wicked,
wholly wicked, wicked tongued and wicked faced.

I’d run a nail through two-by-fours
along your butts to hear you praise the Lord.
A deadly disregard I fear I’ve used
and now my breathing spell is cracked
and I do fear the blindfold. My son will come.

God’s angel is the lip that dares to bounder
here. To bounder, did I say? Did I say hate?
I hate the blindfold. Son, don’t wait, you come
on up and play the love of him who walked
embodiment. My breathing spell is cracked.

Did I misuse the privilege to call on you?

My deadly disregard is what I fear.
You hear the spirit and the bride say come?
The boundered lip, the breathing spell that’s cracked
breathes ‘come’, breathes “son”,
breathes “first”, breathes “last”.

Could we with ink the oceans fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above,
Would drain the ocean dry,
Nor would the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.

 

Fragments overheard before the police came.
I jotted down what I could, then I hid in the cupboard.

Chugging song

Come now, sing now, happy tunes
and drink, drink, drink — we’re in our youth.
“Fool, fool, deliberate fool:
can you drink the cup?
Or will it drown you?
Down, down, three times down,
take the triple-bath, play the triple-tool.
Fool, fool, deliberate fool…”   (repeat)

Continue reading “Maundy Drinking Songs” →

The mist collects to droplets on the leaves,
slight inches from my eye.  I stare.

I do not see the force and law that forms
the silver globes.  I do not see what’s there,
for spinning wild is how the atoms mean
the world.  I stare.

Simple, still, and silent balls, the water
drops just make for me the maelstrom
into symbols.  And I stare.

All men by nature want to know for sure
and poetry is knowing what is there.
The poem is the end of artifice, I’m sure.

And then suspicion that this thought itself
will wisp into some final sucking fire,
this thought that thought is simultaneous
and simultaneous is how to think.

When I affirm that God is one in essence,
essence still, and silent and indeed so simple,
and yet hypostases, yet three, are he and he and he,
the creeds seem end of artifice for me.

I know I think too much, while grass in blades
is choosing how to shape the tuft of blooms,
yet bees are hyperlinking blooms in air,
yet atmospheres are swirling over continents,
yet continents are spinning, wild, the world
into the artificial silver globe among the drops

He stares.  He stares, He finds His thoughts take shapes
as artificial lines.     Yet good.  Yet very good.

You say you know of love.
You heard there was a man who kept a vow
which cost him songs and woman flesh: you sneered,
and sneer replaced your syntax.  Faithfulness
you smeared and so killed story, so you cannot not
betray, and be betrayed.  You riddle Raphael,
demand of Gabriel his password, and the blessed
Michael you sequester for his shots.  You animate
and warm by devil arts, demanding angel proofs
from pronoun parts contorted in a double helix.

You say you know of love.
You nominate yourselves the chefs of love
with tongues forever virgin of the delicates
of love, unable to obtain old age of love.
So smug, and stupid, and smug regarding stupid,
sitting while befouling hind and feet
in excrement, so proud to sit and trowel
it round to front, then back, for it is warm.
Adjust, again, the angle of your friction
and engorge, and say you know of love.

I say I know of love
but only pose a naked contradiction
for sublimity can only be reported,
never proved.  I say love flares in stories
framed by rituals and vows, an agon held
as precious for a lifetime, paths where righteous
souls all trip but rise their seven times per day
to say “I do.”  And this, Oh this
is plot and character, the grail, the rose, the wind
that spins the sun and all the summer stars.

I say I know a love you do not know:
in sickness and in health,
both warm and cold,
in hunger and in wealth,
nubile, and old:
“I do.”

When you lost this you lost it all.
Down, your house is down.  How great the fall.

My sixty-first November carols me.
The stuttered snow, the huddled hawk, the moon
(so bored above the pasture-scape) all wait
the coming Child again,  again the church
plays Mary:  is the future good? How can it be
the angel’s hail is not a curse, since I’ve
not known a man?  Again the carols fling
their seeds, the smallest seeds of all the seeds,
along our deep and dreamless streets.

Sit in water that is over your head,
As if a bird in your hair should be left asleep.
Gaze silently on the Word.
Ask nothing, offer no advice, and when your monkey mind
does monkey, so what?   Do care about your breath,
your hands, and watch the sun melt on the hill.

And even monkeys need a home eventually
so, listen, East, the Spirit deep embedded
never ceases gathering the monkey clan
like mother spreads her skirts
to sing a lullaby which quiets
all who don’t wander off.

Geese form lines in a grey February sky.
The sky is the color of a goose feather.
Pools in the fields are the color of a goose feather.
Last year’s corn is stubbled at the edges of pools.

The geese can read the signs.
From a thousand feet up their lines
etch deep into the cornfield pools.
Starlings watch their own pictograms
form, melt, and re-form toward the name of spring.
Each bird is simple as a child, but the flock is literate and savant, and this is a wondrous thing.

As the sun sets, a cold rain drives in.
Cold, but not too cold for the twitching roots.
Even the stiff firs stretch, and glance up.