Moldy

Maybe you shouldn’t have looked in here, after so many weeks

or months? to find your friends talking about God knows and eight or nine expired poetry challenges, that feeling

like skipping church for a year, then sitting in the town chapel singing Christmas carols with strangers—

didn’t you want to cry? and didn’t you stop yourself, a disciplined no? but listen, I’m telling you

yes: find what’s worth saving, a fresh heart beneath all that must

 

A long-lined acrostic dedicated to the long-neglected crew at Yeah Write.

You have been painting, and find you can still pray

clear-coat me, Lord
with carillon and birdsong
or peel through the yellowed layers
bubbled, of what has been

self-applied, find in me
that thing unfounded:
clear heart, clean brush, blank page

pneuma

what is the spirit? how you felt
exhilarated in the rain and wind
that one time, you were ten
and traveling, you knew
actual magic
*
you must bring it
the yoga teacher says
no one else can
find those places
of either hurt or release
*
in ancient Greek, I’m told
pneuma, verily only
the stuff of life
which blows
over all our heads
*
true dark skies last summer
Milky Way and eclipsed sun

beyond earth’s wind
beyond need for meaning

quick daily faith crisis

where is that seed of simple
belief that now, now

life is full of beauty? or is it

time to accept the preaching
of payments coming due

April Gifts

i.

the cardinal sudden like words
from a friend, bright unexpected
against leafless sky, same sweet
song and soul-balm

ii.

not faith but a kind of pride, your belief
every day should offer something
like this dirt finally warming,
hand-crumbled, enough?

iii.

if the pansies survive
this record cold, it is no god’s bow
to the balance due, nor even
to your impatience

mostly cloudy

when will I be    available to this sun
wanting to warm    cloth skin sense
that kernel    last lick of faith
in ground that must prove
again and again    its fertility
to leaf stem root    worm

in a dark place

you make the god you want, not of gold
or even paper, but green-warm earth—hail
it as something gifted from the blue.

what is your church? but this slate blue
mountain, bare slopes, trees brushed soft gold,
solitude, song; or fall’s sharp wind, rain, hail,

snow silence. eyes closed, face lifted to hail
pilgrim thought. no room for guilt in sky’s blue:
if the soul lights, burns ember-gold—

I am. (gold-hail prayer in this blue)

Thanks to Christine for the three tritina words.

contemplation 9: you stumble

in one glimmer of nothing, and how easy
—you see—to vanish, to sink in the same
darkness, illogic, as generations before.
no one knows you in your shadowing:
not devil nor demons nor angels nor men
(who wrote you off, and how long ago?)
—but will it be now, at mud’s deep
that you instinctively reach an arm out
to swim, that the air takes your lungs
with all the force of forgiveness?

Resonating with today’s Hafiz read, “To Make You Perfect,” translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Old Friends

if our lives became a line
graph: how we grow closer
intersect, grow farther again

or those overlapping circles:
same, not same in definition
dreams, religion, kids—

so we smooth, repair, strengthen
this thread, spin it out stretching
holding over miles and years

contemplation 2

stunned, chained—where is this cog in the great machine,
this puzzling piece in the grand design? is my part beauty,
remembering, simple love? how does beauty stand
against a landslide? how does memory shine
in a millennium’s weight of darkness? how does love open
one fist, finger by finger by finger, and then the next?
can the chain be fingers clasped, my one hand holding yours
or the children I give, having built them of love?

Inspired by Hafiz, “The Heart’s Coronation,” translated by Daniel Ladinsky.

“The pawn always sits stunned, chained,
…
there is nothing but divine movement
in this world.”