18 September 2016: First Christian Church, San Jose

“Cry out, therefore, and write thus”

 

I was 18 years old when I first met her

on the lips of a man I never knew

under a ceiling of stars

in a meadow in the shadow

of a sleeping library

built to look like a fortress.

With my mouth,

he whispered,

Hildegard wrote,

God says,

 

I kiss my own creation, every image
I have made out of the earth’s clay.

 

In the same year of her life,

Hildegard’s feet kissed the threshold

of the convent.
Imagine: finding tenderness

on earth and in heaven at once.

 

In her cell

(yes, they really call it that)

her pen poured out

the questions to their answers.

 

It came to pass,
when I was 42 years and 7 months old,

            that the heavens were opened

            and a blinding light of exceptional brilliance
            flowed through my entire brain.

And so it kindled in my whole heart and breast
like a flame, not burning, but warming,
…and suddenly I understood
the meaning of the expositions of the books.
But although I heard and saw these things,
because of doubt and low opinion of myself
and because of the diverse opinions of men,
I refused for a long time the call to write.

It is quite irrelevant how bitter

the approval of men tastes.
It is mother’s milk.
We are weaned when we are weaned.
Hildegard named her emergence “dread.”

 

Part of the terror is to take back our own listening.

 

It took 833 years after she passed to eternity

under two raging streams of divine light
seen by two Sisters
and therefore unverified

for a committee of men in inherited regalia,

at a table carved by the clandestine dreams
of lesser men and no women at all,

to declare her a Doctor of Souls.

They called it “equivalent canonization,”

the consolation prize.

 

I dare you to say  

it is too little, too late.

4 June 2016

On being the mistress 

I have generally learned to ignore

the things men say in bed. 

But you leave dripping fatalism in my ear

like honey. 

"You will be the end of me." 

Soon I search the fogged mirror

for anything more nefarious 

than unshed adolescence, 

hunger and tears equally ready. 

No one there is peddling extinction. 

There are the beasts, of course, 

disordering the dark libraries of my mind, 

but I know them, 

and all they want is ample solitude. 

Speaking of which, 

I begin to suspect that you are 

being a little dramatic. 

What is the end anyway

except beginning, 

asking all the questions again, 

the quick flaying of coming clean 

when you thought the game 

was to layer compromise on compromise 

and forge a life

from the religion of consequences. 

Eliot said to hold fast to the end, 

if you are fortunate enough to reach it

still breathing. 

The beginning is there again, 

and the end again--

find it enough, 

and you find home. 

But it is not advice easily taken, 

or often. 

23 May 2016

Doctrine

What you left me,
ultimately,
is the doctrine of irreplaceability.
It feels like the place
where your hair meets the skin
the skin of your neck,
rising with touch.
It sounds like the holy quiet
of night giving way to dawn.

In a dream, I place you,
an anachronism
in my grandfather's garden.
After decades of failed attempts,
I am suddenly, strangely
able to grow things.
I can watch the sprout of a pepper plant
and know how light and air
will preach it into bearing.
I can feel the delicate spines
on the skin of a ripening tomato
and see love and letting go
open a window
on the crowded earth
for it to arrive.
Our four hands share
the prophecy of dirt,
the late summer drought
yielding to fruit.

14 May 2016

Trinity

My brother is an artist,
though I am not sure he remembers.

I picture him drawing in charcoal years ago: 

strong, thick lines to delineate an image, 

which he then rubbed off, 

black fingers and muddled page, 

to create the contours 

of an actual, breathing body. 

It is a thing I will never understand, 

this movement of dust into flesh. 

And it is not what I do with words. 

I turn flesh into dust, 

and I rearrange the grains

until they speak some strange new word.  

He resurrected, 

I deconstructed. 

That was always our way. 

And now you, walking back,  

breathing your warmth into what was last

and will be. 

I am not sure which gesture it is.

What was it I imagined otherwise?

Likely some idea,
immaculate at its sharp edges. 

Creator's intent, 

Sustainer's history. 

And at the apex, 

this wound, not healable, 

and not meant to be. 

  

10 May 2016: PSR Palestine Immersion Chapel Reflection

After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James, and John the brother of James, and led them up to a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus. Peter said to Jesus, "Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters--one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah." While he was still speaking, a bright cloud covered them, and a voice from the cloud said, "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!" When the disciples heard this, they fell facedown to the ground, terrified. But Jesus came and touched them. "Get up," he said. "Don't be afraid." When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus. 

When it comes to the Transfiguration, I begin in a foreign place: the pine forests of Georgia in my childhood. Where, in a certain season, the cicadas abandon their skins by the hundreds on the bark of the trees. There are transfigured bugs somewhere. But all you see are the pearl-pale skeletons of bodyshapes clinging.

In love with all things fragile, I wanted to collect them. But each one I touched crumbled. Though I tried every delicate procedure, their no-longer-feet still held fast with unseeable insect tenacity and their ghostly bodies were nearly nothing, disintegrating with the slightest pinch. 

I want to say something about what it is that makes a place--however small--or a time--however brief--holy. But it takes more voices than I have. We could say something about permanence and impermanence, certainty and conjecture. The places and times that wound and heal us. The nowhere and everywhere, suspended time and fleeting time. Finding our way and losing it all at once. 

On Mount Tabor, there are two churches. You would think there was only the one: with mosaic tents for Moses and Elijah and a grand sanctuary for Jesus built on the triumph and treasure of the apostolic assembly. Its doors await the Rolls Royce, the cameras, the rose-bedecked bride. But there is another: ragged quarter walls and damp, dark earth. Perhaps the site is more ancient, more true. Perhaps not. But it is certainly more inviting for the prayers of the dispossessed--a place to imagine the promise of a restored body. Fresh soil calls out, asking to be dug up for a new order, an unvisited wholeness. 

The sunset falls from the crest of Tabor over fertile checkered farmlands claimed a hundred times over. If you squint, you can see the desperate effort to scrawl lines of imaginary safety. I am photographed taking a photograph, the sunset multiplied in the image, as if it could belong to more than one people. 

I did manage to extract a cicada shell once, as best I could tell with all of its microscopic borders intact. It is in a plexiglass box in a mildewed chest somewhere in one of a dozen storage sites in Georgia. No one will ever rock in silent prayer over it as the women do in seclusion at Abraham's tomb. And I do not pray to it today, but to the creatures I could hear but never see emerging into the woods, the ones who search the living earth and air for what is next.

8 May 2016: Berkeley

Fiddleheads

On that particular hillside,
the fog arrives over these three days
in five different bodies
like a shapeshifting god--
     fairy wisp,
     clan of snakes,
     liquid wind,
     lovers' arms,
     queen's full repose.
They tour the villages of private miseries.

In the high hills,
the fog mists over the darkened bedroom windows
of the dozen girls here
with bowed legs and sunken eyes
who dread portioned meals.
It curls around the contemporary facade
of a house full of pacing and blame-throwing,
where the phone registers
the pleas of the novice addict:
the stolen wallet, the blind eye, the never again.

In the low hills,
it brushes past the crumbling apartments--
one earthquake from surrender--
of the young lover
dieting on Ativan and vodka
and the woman
who lost her son, her sister, and her mind
all at once.

At the edge of the cloud,
between the water and the ridge,
is our house,
the children waiting at the window.

I try to imagine what can hold
this immense, provincial ache.
Something in the mist
sets my mind on fiddleheads,
how they turn in so perfectly to hold
their own fragility.
The head of the leaf, the extremities,
the skin and spores,
all one embrace
and shield.
In their season,
thousands of fiddleheads
dwell in the hills outside this window,
fortresses of tortuous waiting
and coming release.

4 May 2016

Credo-40

This is the day I will hold it all lightly,
for my own sake.
I will tell myself that your hands and eyes
spoke truth, what they knew of it,
and that love does not rain on dry ground.
I will not dwell on the alter-worlds
of erasure or return.
I will declare my heart both
entirely taken
and entirely my own.
I will trust that the world
just outside my skin
is not made of daggers and fire.
I will hold the image of you
arriving, and arriving again--
freely, with fresh anticipation--
the last night so like the first.
I will forgive my remembering,
though it draws you dangerously close,
with the soft persistence of your mouth
when words were at rest.

And I will believe the stories people tell--
not because they can be lived,
but because they are believed.