Like Accidental Wine

Like Accidental Wine

(“The Lord is pleased with his people, and he gives victory to those who are humble.” Psalm 149:4)

Borders, landlines,
phonelines and shores along
the cliffs: we want to define the
boundaries
for all time.

But the waves break and move the sands,
tsunamis send ancient landmarks inland. Angels
fly between our certainties and
alight where death occupies space
we’ve allotted to the proper dimensions.

Sometimes the wadis run full,
sometimes the lakes run dry.
Often our rhymes are indistinct,
our metaphors too precise.

Let us spill our language like accidental wine,
let us find the wink of summer as sparrows
mind their business in branches outside our windows.
Let us celebrate all we do not know,
let us sing like resurrected minds.
Let the mechanisms unwind,
let our spirits imbibe the inaccuracy
of it all.

Seasons are not divided by graphite fences,
our senses shuffle between bitter and sublime.
We can hear,
once we lay our words aside,
the faintest ions of wonder being born.

Hear the Crystal Blue

Hear the Crystal Blue

(“Lord, I cry out to you. I say, ‘You are my place of safety. You are everything I need in this life.’” Psalm 142:5)

Did you hear the crystal blue speak to you,
did you see the children smile? Did you
remember you were made
the same as the tiny feet that
run in the late day grass with footballs
as big as their heads?
Did you remember tripping in the
dew-soaked grass
wearing winter boots
and running to your dad like no one saw?
Do you catch your breath once the winter ices the air,
do you shiver when there is no winter at all?

I’ve been like a jumbo jet that lost
an engine and a wing
and discovered my trajectory has been seen
by far too many on the ground. Why did I spiral,
why the fire,
why didn’t the air support my desire to climb?
They close their eyes at the near collision of
the earth and my fuselage. I accuse myself of
crashing far before their barnstormed videos.

What they do not know is that the ocean welcomes us,
the waves wash over us,
the sea soaks us warm.
What they cannot hear are the lyrics to songs only
the dolphins have taught us.

Shall we trust each other when we have not trusted ourselves?
Let us fall, or swim, or sing, or slide down the face
of the next mountain we ascend. Let us send each other
songs
and repeat them, beginning to end until they bring
the same tears
or smiles
they brought the first time we ever
heard them.

Hidden in Windowless Rooms

Hidden in Windowless Rooms

(“However, if it’s from God, you won’t be able to stop them. You may even discover that you’re fighting against God.” Acts 5:38)

Hidden in windowless rooms
awaiting our number to come up,
we feel the clouds close in on us,
we feel the breath of those who shoot
opinions
like dragons full of fire.

We were well-respected, weren’t we?
We’ve owned our stories and told the new one.
Have we threatened the few at the
peak of the pyramid
who send down their edicts like
gods on fire?

We carry no arms,
we do not stockpile caches of weapons.
We walk barefoot, our feet are calloused.
We walk barefoot, our hearts are tender.

Don’t misunderstand. Some of our stories got
the best of us. Some of our history divested us
of any hope to ascend the temple steps that
ripped our unshod feet. We knew how we looked
in the campfires of deceit.

But we are a band bound tight by our miscomprehensions,
we sing in our cells, we pray on the floor. We remember hymns
at midnight while
the rulers knock to find what we are praying for.

I offer my plate, complete with undercooked meat;
I offer my cup with dust napping on top.
The bread is still warm, the crust crisp from the
oven of stone.
The wine is simple. The dialogue drops tears,
one, two, or three,
onto the servings we share when we gather here.

We walk barefoot with our leftover loaves,
we invite more beggars like us to
share our discomfort with wrought-iron fences
and walk the fields where conversation is as
filling as the meals we remember.

The Unnaming of Things

The Unnaming of Things

(“Israel, put your hope in the Lord, both now and forever.” Psalm 131:3)

After all this time,
before the moment I thought to design
a new philosophy of mind,
in the center of the bridge between
chorus and verse
I was surprised that you were nothing like
what I expected.

Certain I had it all defined,
I became bi-lingual and spoke fluently
in words so concrete they were always
bilateral
or
at least
black and white.

The rains came after my skin had been
baked by unknown suns,
the questions hung like laundry on the line
and had to be taken in for protection.

How could I restrict you to breezes I
had named? How could I presume to understand
your geography? I have learned
(such a presumptive phrase)
to love the anonymous blades of grass
and the rivers that ran before they could
be pronounced.

After all this time,
(before I listened for a mouthpiece)
I can swim for days without hearing a word.
My breath isolates me, and I must come up for air
sooner that when I was younger.
Glide. Stroke. Kick. Breathe.
And the clothes I once wore, now soaked in
river whorls midstream

Baptize me again to know far less than I knew
before.

Lectures Never Worked

Lectures Never Worked

(“In your love, listen to me; in your justice, God, keep me alive.” Psalm 119:149 [The Message])

Until then I’ll walk like the
sun shines for you, and I’ll work on a
mystery while I think my time away.
Alone today.

It’s a long way home from here.
It’s a silent walk from here.
It’s a frozen planet of tears,
it’s a burning redrock canyon,
a lonely monologue while people play
war games and blame it all on the
bible.

I never planned to be lonely. And my
phone only rings
when someone wants my money.
I don’t know if that’s true. I haven’t checked my
messages since 2022. Anyway,
I’ve been too hard on myself. I repeat myself,
with lectures that never worked from then till now.

And then a deep pivot that tore up the turf,
the phone rang, and I imagined the circles of the sun
growing lawns and treetops where the
mourning doves cooed the way that only
lovers do.

Somewhere in the middle of me
the smile of a baby
reminded me that kingdoms can be as
small as they are tall.

One thing you should know about me now;
I can watch the wind lift the leaves, one
by
one,
in the autumn haze,
and not feel like I’ve wasted my day.

We Choose Up Sides

We Choose Up Sides

(“The earth, O Lord, is full of your steadfast love; teach me your statutes!” Psalm 119:64)

My request to understand the end of days was declined,
so I,
with feet unwillingly clenching the sand,
survey the pockmarked earth.

I thought they were potholes when the
desert concert ended early. But the sun
never explodes that loudly at the end of the day.

I heard that firebombs burned a hospital and
our children are hidden underground
by their captors.

And while missiles whine, while grandmothers weep,
while the smoke wafts high above the borders,
the selected leaders can find no way to restore
the broken earth
except to break her into quarters.

My face unconsciously flinches,
the heat burns like teenage blemishes.
I cannot debate. I cannot slow the hate that
floods like sludge. The water is not potable,
the water has been shut off at its source.

The grains of sand are shards cutting our toes,
we cannot sleep. We cannot cry. We cannot understand
why. We hate at a distance and invent our fictions
to justify the blood that flows down the streets.

Where
is
this mercy?

Where is the
playground where children play?

Where are the prayers that extend deeper
than ancestry? Where are rivers of life that
turn gall into wine?

We draw the lines so well. We choose up sides.
One life for a dozen. A dozen for a village.
A village for a nation. A nation…

Oh God,
why?

Are there not peacemakers within range of
the missiles and squadrons? Why do the church bells
toll
and send the crowd to war?
Peacemakers, children, hostages, generals,
saints, mystics, truants, tyrants,
presidents, ministers, visitors, and citizens

Cry,
why?

Everything I Wanted

Everything I Wanted

(“Aren’t two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s consent.” Matthew 10:29)

There was everything I wanted just inside
the pair of eyes
pre-empting professional conventions.
Who knows, if you can hear me,
whether words stay glued near me or
break through space and time like
electrons escaping the strong force at
elemental levels.

You told me your story between questions about
my health.
I think we could talk forever, but my insurance covers
only an hour, I think. I should have brought coffee as
a write-off. Between laughs and family angst,
we talked about my pain, my usual topic for our
appointments. And we talked about grief, the subject
that, it seems,
has made me a doula in this latter time.

I went late to lunch and the server asked about my
pain. She always does. And it comforts me. She stays
at my table moments longer than any other and wonders
how I do it. And I wonder too.

There were surprises, two tacos, a beer,
and a friend walking in with new music
for me to hear.
Our shirts matched, imagine that, two sky-blue
guayaberas. He and his friends sat as I exited
the restaurant that feels like home.

Everything I’ve wanted is in this village. The doves
lift their steel gray wings perching on branches as Autumn
paints an earth scene to surround them. I wish I knew their names,
and I would tell them my pain is eased for just a moment
as they sit exposed just outside my window.

Morning Reverie

Morning Reverie

(“Light rises even in darkness for the one who is right. He is kind and has loving-pity and does what is right.” Psalm 112:4)

It was a calico morning when the
sun,
banana yellow,
squeaked through the window treatments
in the old cabin on the hill.
A feral cat or two
hunted and pounced while
the coffee brewed in the aluminum urn
on the stove.
The gingham was replaced with forest
green
curtains,
the floorboards creaked like the elder’s
bones as he got out of bed.
There were memories in every crevice of
the oily paneling, there were creations that
refused to be put aside. Chili was cooked in
an iron pot
suspended over the eternal flame in the
corner fireplace. The poker rested on the
stonework mantle, the bellows exhausted from
last night’s work.

The doves were waiting for the graying clouds
to arrive and
huddled in a branch of the
pear tree
that snuck up under the eaves.

The children were gone for years now,
the generations were finding their way home.
But he poured a cup of the black elixir
and laughed

As the doves seemed to kiss midflight, then
rose with the breeze and landed,
wing-in-wing,
a breath-long distance from his morning reverie.

The Silent Jukebox

The Silent Jukebox

(“That man never thought of being kind; he persecuted and killed the poor, the needy, and the helpless.” Psalm 109:16)

The jukebox no longer played tunes
for a dime, for a quarter, for a dollar.
It was crying at the violence and the music
was left out in the rain.
We stopped listening to the words a
long time ago.

There were too many who
refused
to be soothed and
the moments passed without a single
rose breaking the mood the weeds had strewn
across the table.

No one knew why the music no longer played,
cigar smoke broke the air gray and blue. The
booth for
two
no longer was occupied. There were rips in
the cushions,
there was a disturbance in time. One came
early, one arrived late, they used to dine
together, now they were separate ghosts.
Coffee winced down their throats at opposing
sides of the day.

There was no way to explain how the diner became
so thick with the heartbreak that cracked the days
with silence. Some would blame, some would
write computer code,
some would pray,
some would divide it all into rows and columns.
But the soul

Needed something more than pop songs to
right the wrongs. On the other side of town
no one knew that coffee was poured here without
a sound.

The Days Are Short

The Days Are Short

(“He turned the wilderness into pools of water and the desert into flowing springs.” Psalm 107:35)

I wanted to get a head start and send you
the pre-snow breath of autumn. The days are short
for bare feet and wine in the sun.
And though my own hours are divided in
half,
I would share them with you as if we had
a hundred years to spend
listening to streams and frogs playing on the banks.
I would walk the levees, even though my legs give
out so much quicker in this slant-lighted season.
I meet my limit far too soon,
or start far too late in the day. Please
don’t feel you must arrange your schedule around me.
But the sparrows were bathing in
a puddle earlier, the leaves hanging lightly to
their branches as they blush before winter.
I wonder if last year’s leaves are happy as loam,
if the rose petals feed next year’s blooms.

Though pain commands my hours, tells my
bones there are fewer miles I can travel in a day, the
dawn peeks in anyway.
Complaint is not a language that settles well on my tongue.

There is time to build a new earth, though my time fades.
There are reservoirs of mercy though the sun sets early.
The deer eat the remains of the apples in my yard,
the guns half a world away disturb the mountain’s flow.
There are babies fighting for breath, there are elders
forced underground.

The day is punctuated. The percussion becomes harsh.
The rivers flow but are dammed by territorial possession.

And we wait for rain that will wash us clean,
we hope the river will soon drown our sorrows
and
cleanse our inhuman intentions.

Come, let us walk together, holding hands across the
hostile borders.

While the Children Learn

While the Children Learn

(“Lord, you have made so many things! How wise you were when you made all of them! The earth is full of your creatures.” Psalm 104:24)

I’m not sure how to go about this.
I see my chihuahua lapping up the Autumn sun.
She chases the squirrels away, she patrols the yard
against the next door Husky a hundred times larger than she.
I am lonely still, missing my hearts who have left this world.
I wish the blue jays knew me by name,
the hummingbirds also, when they buzzing sounds like
mosquitos.

Saint Francis knew the bluebirds’ songs. He wrote their
notes upon his heart. I wish I could hear just a few more words
from the departed I’ve loved, from the disheartened who
filled the earth with more love than
most of us are worth.

I’ve seen geckos sunning in Mexican terraces,
moose standing by a Canadian road. I’ve heard
loons echoing the late afternoon and
seen the young Northern pike caught on the end of
an icy hook. I’ve heard the coyotes calling from the
buttes across the frozen lake,
I’ve heard the ice crack as the sun went down.
I’ve tasted fish fried fresh from the augured ice
with crackers and Vienna sausages to tide us over.

But today I heard from a close friend, how myriads of missiles
attacked his homeland. I ached that there are borders that
God has not drawn. I weep that butterflies know more than
we do.

Mid-Autumn is when the grasshoppers leap from
wheat sheaves to ditches by the side of the road.

October is when hostages were taken,
buildings were demolished,
politicians polished their speeches to take
advantage
of ancient hatreds that have nothing to do with
the ways of God in the world.

When our borders are reasons for death,
when our faith is motivation to unleash onslaughts
beneath the structures of sanity,
then perhaps we need to listen again. Perhaps
we need to sit cross-legged again on the
sand of the desert
and let our children play. Let our children
play. We have paid too much to be adults
when we bark like wild dogs at every unfamiliar
sound. Let the moon shine while the children learn
the names of cousins they never knew.

Camp Meeting/Flowers of the Field

Camp Meeting/Flowers of the Field

(“If that’s how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, won’t He do much more for you—you of little faith? Matthew 6:30)

For the time being, let us assume I am
breakable. Not much of a stretch, that.
And yet when the cracks appeared I
hid them under rebuilt aspirations.

You were angry once, my friend, when I stayed
halfway back in the congregation. Masses wept
at the front (they call it the altar) and you joined them
wetting the moldy carpet with your own tears.
I did not.

I had visited before and come away with knives
piercing my eyes. I had knelt a hundred times and
felt the stare of every soldier who wondered why
I was there. And so I said

No more.

I stayed in my seat. The music wrapped round me,
the glossolalia rose and fell with the crescendos that
swelled
from the well of penitents hoping demons would
leave them alone and go back to hell.
They hoped to escape the flames themselves.

No fault remains but my own. But I had already
paid my rent on nights like that. I would confess
even more
but everyone abhorred what they already heard.
I needed to let God speak a better word while no
one
cross-examined my soul.

So, I am sorry I didn’t repent so openly;
I’m sorry I grow only in the quiet. Two
decades later
I know so much better,
and hope bouquets of kindness

Take the place of tears and bitterness.
My sanity demands it. My spirit has been
restored to its original dimensions.

When Joy is Ancient Like Rain

When Joy is Ancient Like Rain

(“Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!” Psalm 95:2)

Run in for cover,
that’s how my soul feels on days like these,
find somewhere to hide. Not that
I am in danger; I find my heart craving
impossible meals and solo excursions with
a gypsy mind.

There were two friends on the road,
one danced with his classmates and one
sipped wine whenever it was offered.
They had met up after 50 years,
they thought they might recognize the
old poppy fields. They thought they might taste
the teenage pizza they shared, a large
hot Italian sausage. They played pong
while they waited.

There were dark wooden tables there.
There were girls who recognized us.
There was a boy who looked like me
who thought he knew, finally, for once,
how the world worked and how God handed
out prizes to the penitent.
He cried in his room a lot over
cravings and old coffee cups underneath his bed.

This man, me-who-writes,
would give up a quarter cup of convenience
for a pinch of ad-libbed laughter in a
favorite restaurant.

I could sing of your insanity forever,
the ways you schemed, the poems you dreamed,
and the ways you viewed the world, they way
you practiced each scene like it was the first day
of a trip through the winding roads of the East Bay Hills.

Today, though the rain speaks every name I’ve
learned along the way,
I will listen for their songs. The joy feels like sadness,
the gladness sounds like monks chanting. The silence
looks like a doorway to sojourn and paisley afternoons.