Now That the Burden is Gone

Now That the Burden is Gone

(“As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our wrongdoings from us.” Psalm 103:12)

Did you see the dizzy way the day
turned like a clown? Did you pick up the
gravel that had been spread around your feet?
Which hour cost you the most?
Which stroke of the pen made all the difference?

The air is purer where the breeze has blown
every accusation further down the slopes. The
lights are brighter, full spectrum and sun, where
the tears are wiped from your cheeks. The
sounds turn from sullen bellows to the laughter
of a playground full of children.

Did you walk past the place where it first happened?
Did you fight the memories where they discarded their
own fears on your spine?
Did you sit in the backyard where they found what
they called evidence of your crime?
Did you take the time, today, straightway, and become
underwhelmed by the inherent insanity of it all?

The past is lighter where the breath of God has
whispered the pointed fingers back to their holsters? The
day breaks more softly, the angles are less oblique, and
the glass more transparent where one word is the word.
The distances from one sin to another are measured in
light-years. And your soul, like a beast of burden,
is happier now that the burden is gone.

Reading Dizzy

Reading Dizzy

(“A house is built by wisdom. It is made strong by understanding.” Proverbs 24:3)

He pulled the rotted handrails from my front porch
resting upon treated redwood front steps green. He meant
to replace the old splintered rails that with deep wounds where
the grain had run. From icy tan to dusty brown to the
aged grey of old wood and men, the rails showed the years,
and the work the power-frost had wrought upon the handhold
that now was nearly faded from day.

But he’s a spinning top, a whirligig jumped off the table
and clattering between wooden legs and fleshly feet,
fast, furious, so much a blur no one know what he is.
His label is indecipherable; the more he spins, the less he shows
of himself to us.

But he knows, he thinks, the words that tumble faster than
his works,
will make up for the languid faults everyone knows and
everyone has read who did not know. He speeds through the story,
and then speeds to the solution for your story, and you are
never sure who began and why your car was now scheduled
for a break job in his garage.

He calls the friends with the handrail, and, though he means well,
he may have to put it off a day, the brakes need him now, need
him faster, show him better. And you never mind very much; a week,
a month, or until the next frost when you will mount it yourself.

He moves so fast; he is still afraid we might read him real,
and then, what tender would he possess to gather the next friendship
to replace the sadly spoken ones; the broken ones who left,
he thought, because the label was clear. The spun as well as he, and
spinning

Read no one’s labels at all.