And We Frolicked

And We Frolicked

(“Prophesy to the breath. Prophesy, son of man. Tell the breath, ‘God, the Master, says, Come from the four winds. Come, breath. Breathe on these slain bodies. Breathe life!’” Ezekiel 37:9)

It was a strong wind that lifted the crossword images
from the river to the sightlines from the shore.
We were scratching
jigsaw puzzles we bought for Christmas.
The sonic booms tried their hand at prophesying
new faces of the moon. All they ended up doing
was scaring the dogs huddled underneath the tables
in the living room.
There was an exhalation that warmed the journey
we expected to run in the morning mist. We were
dead on our feet,
deceased upon the heels of our discontent.
We ceased moving and wallowed in the mud
while waiting for the wind to come our way again.

We had been looking for our necessary mood when our time
finally ran out. We were dry as corpses, broken like
long-held fantasies of winning back our losses. That
was the day breathing and the sun turned to sand.

But there was movement in the air, we could feel it
though we could not hear it. There were wild geese
honking up the sky in their v-shaped migration. And the
wind stirred between us, lifting us lightly above ourselves,
entering ourselves, unwrapping ourselves, reviving our
selves in ways we had wished for so long. We missed the
ways things once were when the trees caught the breeze
in their branches and shared it with the forest floor.

The wild geese stirred the wind again and like a burst
of unbounded joy we opened anew to as breath
entered us, centered us, reoriented us; we saw anew and
thanked the spirit. We heard anew and knew the tune. We spoke
too soon, so we quietly listened as our skin felt the touch of
wildness we had been pursuing for years. In our stillness
it caught up with us, and we frolicked like we had been
born again.

With the Tongue

With the Tongue

(“With [the tongue] we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse people, made in the likeness of God.” James 3:9)

Another day I might have ignored the comment,
another time I would have kept my peace.
Another day I would have slept through the thunder storm,
another time I would have caged my words.
You didn’t know the races that person ran,
you didn’t pay attention to their struggle and pain.
You just ran your tongue over your incisors, sharpening
your sentences to slice them whole. You memorized
the hymns and high songs,
and spit out invectives like tiny missiles across the
face of the target of your disapproval. Your aim was
off-center and your poison spread around the room.

The mouth formed the words moments after you
thought them. You didn’t look close enough to see
that the victim of your aspiration was another
re-creation of the Divine you loved to sing about.
You tamped down like a foot destroying a rose,
destroying the image that would have beautified the moment.
You doubled-down your unsacred sound moments after
How Great Thou Art, and Amazing Grace. You scattered
the light you could have shared across the floor in the
faintest phosphorescence.

God doesn’t need your compliments, God isn’t looking
for your slippery accolades. But God is waiting for you to
inhale and find the words to reverse the damage you did
to his creative artisan. You are just a crock of clay,
and so am I, inhabited by the Spirit, we should be
shining without looking away.

I Tried to Count the Stars

I Tried to Count the Stars

(“Jesus answered, ‘The foxes have holes to live in. The birds have nests to live in. But the Son of Man has no place to rest his head.’” Luke 9:58)

I tried to count the stars last night and
thought of you.
How naïve to believe they were
just lanterns swinging from an overhead dome.
I tried to measure the miles from them
to where I stood
and fell asleep as the earth turned toward morning.
I tried to count the years in our days and
wondered how we mourn a friend’s passing one morning,
and attend a christening the next.
Light and dark fight it out for our
attention. We are membranes with ears,
eyes diffusing summer leaves in sharp relief.

I assume I have passed you on the street a thousand times,
or met you on an overpass while chrome machines roar
underneath.

I tried to think my way through the last two decades,
pray my way into unconscious flights of ecstasy.
I have missed every face I’ve known,
have remembered la anciana begging on a sidewalk
in Cancun.
I’ve trimmed my roses before the snow fell and waited
until May to watch them bloom.
I’ve seen the rain spit up dust on a Texas afternoon.
I have swallowed my song too long
fearing the tune would elude me.

But I’ve watched, though I rarely see,
your way through the galaxy and your
face that dropped tears on the cheeks of a child,
on the forehead of a child,
on the first blue tulip, the first daffodil.
And I wonder how many abodes we count looking
for home.

Looking For the Cottage

 
Looking For the Cottage

(“When the builders laid the foundation of the temple of the Lord, the priests in their apparel stood with trumpets and, from the Levites, the sons of Asaph stood with cymbals to praise the Lord.” Ezra 3:10a)

I need a break from myself,
the asphalt has been rolled across my
soul for too long. It does not help to patch
the cracks.

I want a whole new foundation,
a life I do not need to defend,
a place to park my unkempt buggies
and chariots of expiration.

I know I’ve run over your inspiration,
I know it’s been hit and run and then
hit and miss.
I know now how pleasant uncertainty
can be
but I’ve lived on a diet of prepackaged
meals for too long.

So when I drive up in my new hippie van,
or walk in the fields barefoot again,
a few will say how wonderful to see someone
old and depressed as me
happily hunting butterflies after the mists
have moved east at afternoon.

Others will greet me, then hear me,
then wonder why I ever let the cinder blocks
crack the way they did. Why didn’t I read the
upkeep manuals,
why didn’t I play the music that resonates
with the prefab homes we lived in so long?

And me? I imagine a coffee date,
a friend who doesn’t hesitate to grab my neck
and won’t let go
no matter how much I’ve changed. I don’t even
mind
if it scares them some, just so long as they
wrap me in memory. My desires are out
of my control.

And that is what scares me. What angers some.
What leaves me on the edges, misunderstood and alone.

I’m still looking for the home where the foundation expands
every time there is another knock on the door from
wayward travelers who smell the chili in the dutch oven and
the smoke from the wood-burning stove. I’m still
waiting to join the house where hands are devoted to
healing the gaskets that are encrusted with grime.

I’m looking for the cottage made without hands,
and the family who was expecting me the whole time.

This Day Has Drained Me

This Day Has Drained Me

(“’Don’t be alarmed,’ he told them. ‘You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they put him.’” Mark 16:6)

Today was dusty, though the sky was
airier
than normal.
It’s not up to me to
judge,
what with the law of relativity,
but I’m not sure I can break even,
or that evening breaks me.

I’ve waited for angels to pull me aside,
widen my view,
point out the empty place in the tomb.
Most days it is merely damp.

Not that I don’t hear the simple syllables
that insist
there is more,
much more than this.
It is all the other voices I’ve collected
and the dark strings of connected incidentals
that have swarmed my silence.

There still is a narrator that insists,
an immovable rock or island,
a force exists that resists my localized
view of things. How can this inner cavern quench
such glorious light,
how can a few chemicals in the brain
convince me the sun does not shine.

Whether it’s the smoke from the forests
or the haze from the factories,
this gravity will not let me spin out of control
even when the whole day has been wasted.

He is not here
(they
say)
and I nod in assent.
But if I understand the angels rightly,
(or the record of their descant)
I may find him on the next turn
down the road.

For now, I cut and paste
words and phrases
trying to edit my life.

I Do Not Dance Enough

 I Do Not Dance Enough

(“Then the men asked, ‘Why are you looking among the dead for someone who is alive?’” Luke 24:5b)

I see the stars and I want to keep them company;
I see my protection above and within it all.
(I committed the crime; I was not framed.)

A chihuahua barks while a fat stellar jay perches
in the tree outside my window. Hummingbirds sweep
by the feeder
on my redwood deck and speed to the walnut tree
branches for refuge.
(Someone once told me I do not dance enough.)

I visited the San Gabriel Mission more than once as a child,
and created a model of cardboard and green tempura for
a school project. I was 10, and, even then, knew my art
would never hang on a wall. I wanted my mom’s opinion,
and after stalling for the longest two seconds I ever knew,
she said,
“It’s unique.”
I knew what she meant and never made a model again.
(She did like my writing, though.)

The air is light today with a full July sun. The leaves wave
at one another vivified by the river breeze. Shadows on
the siding hint that the afternoon is waning. I may walk along
the marina later
or spend time finding celluloid reels for a future viewing.
(I ought to ban “ought” from my daily life.)

So, vocabulary fails the description. My words are
unvarnished models of a universe I have met. No longer
the center,
life spills from light-years and babies’ mouths, from
empty tombs and full moons, from synapses and
the way light dances in signals to the brain where
we process everything.
(No one deserves life or earns it. We are born in the minute
we breathe the Spirit.)

No One is Looking

No One is Looking

(“Our earthly fathers correct us, and we still respect them. Isn’t it even better to be given true life by letting our spiritual Father correct us?” Hebrews 12:9)

If I wish for just a few more moments,
a day, a weekend, eight days or seven,
I could prove to you I function better
with the pain annulled and my mind clearer.

And yet they ask me, in geometric proportions,
how I’m learning the lesson, with disguised assertions
about meaning and karma, all things and bad things
and the reasons they happen.

My answers are weaker as the pain has become
a red ribbon stretching past memory’s happy sky.
I have stop analyzing, asking why, and cry far more often
now that all my reasons have run dry.

Pain leaves me lonely, it is my only conversation.
8-5 is torture, my body an enemy-nation occupying the
joys once, the stories twice, and the months pass
faster while I wait for an explanation;

Or a new creation to take the leaden weight,
once free to think, beyond river’s rapport with the ocean.

I’ve cried at each limping interval;
the silence is unkempt and literal.
My sentences have no periods,
my commas are not large enough.
There are no interludes; only agony
without the ecstasy.

So, with faith a microbe and hope a single Pennsylvania firefly,
I wonder what You will do with me. Why you have done this to me.
For, in all honesty, I see no purpose now for this hotly searing
fire in my head
that sheds cold tears

When no one is looking.