18 September 2013: This Home, Last Days

Postcard from Here

There’s not much to tell

except that the sweet orange 

cherry tomatoes have continued

to spread their thin skins to transparent

and fill with with fruit,

in defiance of the blight.

Maybe also that the orange slant of light

that enters this room at eight

makes me wish for you.

It’s just that it is so improbable,
that glow like sunrise and sunset
and another planet, all at once.
So that if you could find your way across the miles
to just sit with me here for a while, 
in defiance of the blight, 

our shared witness might coax it to stay.

This room might find its way to taut hopefulness again,
might tremble at its edges
knowing its kinship with the slender thread of fall chill

woven into the late summer breeze.

Because I mean to follow that thread

back to the black dirt

or crystalline cloud it came from,

and ask what it is that compels the earth

to go dormant,

to end the blight not by healing the tomatoes,
but by sinking it all in a flood of frost

that spares only what huddles underground

or builds four walls.

I imagine you here to sanctify this waiting,

unsure how long it will last,

certain that this eight o’clock glow will move on 
in its journey to the earth’s darker side,

unaware of how much it is still needed here.

5 August 2013: Lake Champlain

Search for the Plesiosaur

“It doesn’t take much for a creature

to become a monster,”

he informs me,

tossing stones into shallow water.

“But it takes even less to bring them back.
They just have to know you love them.”

So we walk the sandy parts of the lake’s shore,

the wooded ones,

the bouldered coves,

the train tracks
sprouted with summer wildflowers.
We paddle out by kayak,

take the ferry roundtrip

across the narrow neck of the lake, 

linger at the apex of the arched bridge

between New York and Vermont.

I buy a second ice cream cone.
In case we find him.

In case he likes ice cream.

The time passes with comments on newness--
the peculiar flowers that seem to live just here,

the feel of cold, fresh lake water

under the layer warmed by the summer sun,

vistas with mountains whose names we don’t know, 
the way we can see rain clouds moving in 
from so far away.

I have no way to tell him, eight years old,

that I’ve been here before,

and not once.

This is where all the trouble starts—

searching for a monster

with a tender heart. 

23 July 2013: Charles River Summer Storm

Deliverance

I have only two emotions:
Careful fear and dead devotion.
~Carin Besser

Ripe with the fruitlessness of effort,
I watch
a hazy-bellied ant
face a lake of raindrops.

Six times she gives
her entire lifeforce
to the intention.

Six times she skitters
back and forth
at the water’s edge,
deciding.

Six times she sets out,
limbs, invisible
from the omniscience
of my park bench,
attenuated with purpose.

Six times her microscopic head
strains with terrified defiance,
then resigns
to the asphalt shore.

I despise this metaphor--
the fall down three times, get up four,
root down in the hurricane,
suffer now, live later
story of salvation.

I want to build her a boat
with what I have at hand,
a nibbled-edge oak leaf.

It will seem to her, I imagine,
infinite dry land
for a moment--
because that’s all she really needs
this time,
until next time.

So I offer her fragile deliverance
as the ominous shimmer
of a rain line charges
toward us across
the river’s surface.

Of course I see it coming.

But I'm certain
it’s aiming for some other
castaways.

28 April 2013: Tidal Basin, Washington DC

What we are given is taken away,
but we manage to keep it secretly.
We lose everything, but make harvest
of the consequence it was to us. Memory
builds this kingdom from the fragments
and approximation.
  ~Jack Gilbert, "Moreover"

Walking the Monuments (for Jack Gilbert)

This is when I remember
it is a rare man who knows
he never touches the same woman
twice.

Somehow
she is always on that idle, receptive walk,
her bedrock shifting

with the child (not her own)
climbing just that much too far
out on a tree limb
bowing toward the river’s edge,

with the schizophrenic’s urgent address
to the cracks in the sidewalk,

with the inexplicable taxi driver
who abandoned Casablanca for Virginia
in search of adventure,

with the danger of getting lost
in the sunshine’s second offering of itself
at late day in the water’s shimmering.

There is no part of her that belongs
to you wholly.

But don’t believe what she tells you--
her future is always negotiable.
She can pray just as well amid the explosions
as the raining flowers.

Any newness offers up
that tectonic movement,
that edgy ecstasy.

This is when I remember
it is a rare touch that says
rest here for a moment,

it is enough.

26 March 2013: On the Priesthood

Visitations

It’s not that it’s unusual
for the saints to visit my dreams.

Francis once shuffled up to the screen door
caked in red clay dust,
trailed by a dozen woodland creatures
who raided my cupboards
for bread and nuts
while he wearily brushed himself off
on the shag rug.

Teresa came from Avila
to overhaul the order of my bookshelves,
and express her serious concern
over the weariness she'd heard in my writing. 
During vigils, she hovered. 
During dinner, she paced.
I was relieved when she left,
even as the warm aura of mothering
left with her.

Yesterday, I read that when she was nine, 
the one they called "Little Flower"
shook the room at night
with her body's tremors, 
and that she was subsequently diagnosed
with an excess of emotional frustration. 
I could relate. 
So I read on to her death of tuberculosis
too few years later,
her lungs breaking down to liquid in her chest, 
rising up like magma through her throat. 
In those feverish days of dying, 
she made a promise:
"I will use my time in heaven
to love the earth.
I will send rainstorms of roses."

And I begin to understand why we pray
to the minor saints. 

When she entered the convent, 
the nuns appraised her with amusement. 
She was precocious and wildly sensitive. 
She devoured the attention of her superiors.
She was, they said, 
"a soul that wanted everything."

I know for what approximates fact
that she wanted to feel the lightning strike
of transubstantiation in her hands
this side of death, 
if she had not already. 

So in my dream last night, 
she flopped down moodily beside me
on the cement curb
in the blazing August sun
and handed me a grape popsicle
dripping down her arm, then mine. 

She stretched out her pale, round legs
and set to sullen study
of the sparkling mica flecks in the pavement, 
her shoulder leaning into me 
like my daughter in a church pew,
less than half-earnestly trying
to contain her fiery impatience. 

Until, of course, she can't. 
"I'm still practicing, you know. 
They have to let me do it someday."
She reaches into her backpack 
for a ragged crust of bread, 
raises it to heave raining crumbs 
on her shirt, 
and turns to place a piece
on my lips. 
The burning world around us, 
writ small, 
quivers in her eyes. 

24 March 2013: British Museum (1998)

Meeting Guanyin

The first time I saw those eyes
in the shadows of your cupped palms,
they weren’t eyes at all.
They were wounds, half healed at the edges,
still open wide in the middle,
speechless and disbelieving.

So you can understand
why I couldn’t accept that posture
of flirtatious ease,
robes rippled like healing water.

You know that this present moment
we are asked to meet with equanimity,
with that serene contemplation
that turns your face
into a still lake under hovering fog
in early morning--
this moment, like every moment,
is stretched to bursting seams
with desperate pleas you can’t possibly answer. 

In the summer,
my children’s sun-touched, sandaled feet
stomp joyfully on ground
once drenched with the blood
of another mother’s child.

So why be coy?
We carry these bodies like stone and steel,
but we are all exposure--
even you,
in the shadowy depths of your resting hands
(which have no time to rest),
in the hardly veiled welcome
of your parted thighs.

And from inside your carved enclosure,
this is what you say:
what else is there to do
with open flesh, 
except to bless and wipe away the carnage,
stand on the edge of exposed nerve, 
and go on answering,
go on creating the wounded world.

23 February 2013: Hudson Valley

So this is what it comes down to in the end: earth and sand skimmed, trimmed,         
filleted from rocky bone, leaving only solid unshakeable bottom, what doesn’t in the
end give in to the relentless hammer, whoosh, and haul-away of tides but stands there
saying ‘Here I am here I stay,’...no going back to how things were once, but to go on
ending and ending here (from “Rock Bottom,” Eamon Greenan)

It is written that Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion commissioned with nothing less than easing the suffering of all beings, had what can only be described as a cosmic nervous breakdown. The bodhisattva was a man at the time, a simple human-shaped vessel, and took on his task in earnest for some time. That is, until the sheer volume of living pain resounding in his conscience caused his head to explode, and he was forced to call upon Amitabha Buddha for some relief of his own. Questionable relief it was: Buddha took pity on him and granted him not a much needed reprieve, but eleven heads to divide the effort. Presumably renewed in this ghastly form, he received those countless voices calling out his name, and reached out to grant aid where he could. So great was his exertion that his arms likewise exploded into a thousand pieces, and again he was forced to call upon Amitabha to have compassion on him. “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.” 

Thence comes the beautiful, coquettish female Guanyin with a thousand arms, whom we usually see dancing in joyful surrender. She is far too lovely to carry eleven heads, so instead she bears an eye in the palm of each hand, to see suffering in all corners of the world—brokenness rising up in exotic beauty and grace, and beauty and grace masking bottomless wells of misery. 

This reflection was mired in impossibility from the start, and it has taken me weeks to process what seems like even a partial response. It began when I read this: http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/2013/01/22/mallick_why_newtown_victim_noah_pozner_had_an_open_coffin.html 

For a full week afterward I could see in my mind’s eye nothing but Caravaggio’s bizarre homage to the “doubting” Thomas—Mallick’s words that dumbstruck finger mindlessly probing the wound in Jesus’ side. But behind the author’s hazy fascination with the morbid stands a mother's resolute offering of the sacrifice of her son’s flesh into the political morass of gun control. It is the mystic’s impulse: to stare into the abyss, to look decisively into this open wound and demand that others do the same. It is the same rock bottom that kicked up dust under Isaac’s feet in that predawn climb in his father's resigned shadow—spared in the end, but truly sacrificed already in that first step onto the mountain's face. 

We tend to talk about suffering as monolithic, a single cloak of darkness to be cast off. But the experience of embodiment teaches us again and again that pain is in fact quite specific and grounded. Children in China were taught that if they called out to Guanyin in their suffering, she would be there to respond, appearing in any shape appropriate to the circumstances. Not an abstract deliverance, but a specific one, tailor-made for that moment and that particular hurt. 

I doubt there is much comfort, in the presence of a child’s mangled body, in the proposition that nothing is ever really lost. The resurrection faith teaches us that what is true and loved persists, and the way of enlightenment tells us that it is not so much that loss happens to us as it is that we suffer because our very obsession with the impermanent makes pain ever-present.

Yet there is no doubt that the experience of loss is our greatest spiritual teacher; each broken thread shows us a bit more about what we truly love, and what is at stake in each moment. And then there is this entirely other realm of loss, where the impossibly perfect bodies of children are left broken on playgrounds, streets, in schools, in their own homes. It is not so much an occasion for mourning as it is a great, gaping wound in the fabric of existence. It is simply not possible to speak to such a wound in our usual mode, with our petulant demands that it be healed now so that we can go on as we were. There is nothing to be done in fact, as Mamie Till (and this) and Veronique Pozner well knew, except to gaze straight into it and know that it is the pure exposure of all of our mundane failures, resounding with all that we do and all that we leave undone.

I suspect that it is at the site of such a wound that we come closest to the possibility of Christian discipleship. Jesus’ disciples were at times understandably obsessed with death, feeling the spiraling urgency of Jesus’ challenge to a bloodthirsty political order. They would ask him to stop, slow down, or at least reassure them of coming glory. There is something about staring straight into the face of the end that grants sanctity to what would otherwise be bereft of meaning. But Jesus’ response is that the only truth to be known about death rests in the womb of embodiment, the precious vulnerability with which we enter a treacherous world: 

“The disciples said to Jesus, ‘Tell us how our end will be.’ 

Jesus said, ‘Have you discovered, then, the beginning, that you look for the end?
For where the beginning is, there will the end be. Blessed is he who will take his
place in the beginning; he will know the end and will not experience death....
Blessed is he who came into being before he came into being. If you become my
disciples and listen to my words, these stones will minister to you.” (Gospel of Thomas)

Veronique placed a stone in Noah’s hand, I can only presume to accompany his released spirit with something relatively sure and unchanging. She saw, as every mother would, his beginning in his end, the angel spirit captured for too brief a time in the clear vessel of childhood.

For the rest of us, in a world that manufactures child sacrifice every day, where else can we think we stand except at rock bottom, called to heed the ministry of stones and of broken bodies? While the living world goes about its frantic business, the inert creation cries out that there is nothing more holy than this ephemeral flesh, no higher calling than to fiercely defend its blessed moment of flourishing.