Beyond

Beyond

(“You are wonderful, Lord, and you deserve all praise, because you are much greater than anyone can understand.” Psalm 145:3)

It is not so much that I have waited too long,
or that you have been late in arriving (the very last thing
I would consider). It may even be that I waited to see
the unseeable. I listened like a recording technician,
faithful to the layers and bursts, the measures and rests,
as well as the melody the composer invented on paper.

And now, just as I was blind for looking too dimensional,
I must admit I was waiting as well for the unhearable.

Your light is not so dim that we only see its faint glow
against the darkest black on the market;
Your voice is not so faint that we only hear it when even
the crickets have lost their nerve.

Your light is higher, and, though the word is understood,
even the word does little good, and yet, I will say, you are

Brighter.

But it is not a matter of lumens or wavelength, it is our limited
perception. We see, and are blind. We point out the sparkle upon the river,
the diamonds overrunning the waterfall and the rainbow in the mist.
And, thinking we have seen it all, we measure glory, for which
there is no measure,
we measure glory a factor above the daylight cast upon our
favored view. We even saw what few others viewed.

Neither are you too faint for our human ears. We know by rote
that dogs can hear what we cannot. But your language comes
to be heard, sometimes by the singing bird, others the crash
of the river as it diverts its flow upon an ancient boulder in its path.

Those are surely your notes, your memos, the table of contents
for Creation’s greatest novel. And perhaps the silence is your language
full. For we confuse the silence with emptiness, and go searching for
another poet to sing our blues.

Beyond and above, greater and below, in radial love like
a circular embrace, what we do not hear may be the best of

All we have heard.