My Basic Intentions

My Basic Intentions

(“Whoever loves pure thoughts and kind words will have even the king as a friend.” Proverbs 22:11)

I fashioned the words I needed to
cash in the debts I was owed. I would never
ask for repayment directly but hint at
the mindless muddle it left me in.

Should we meet up to discuss it;
will you repay me when you can?
Or should I write it off, call it grace,
leave it alone transformed like mud into gold?

I’ve got words inside me I have rarely spoken,
fortunes I have not spent. I don’t need the cash,
I didn’t mean to bring it up again.
Rivers sometimes overflow their banks.

I would rewrite the note I sent if that would help.
I should not have raised the subject at all.
I am afraid that trees sometimes fall without warning
and unpredictably finish the day on the forest floor.

My intentions were pure, or so I hoped;
it was the wording that got in the way.
I did not know how to bring it up and
now I wish I never had.

So now I’ll say it all out loud; I’ll recite
what were my basic intentions. I’ve erased
the moment from my mind and left it behind
to feed my roses that have just begun to bloom.

I Hear/Bread and Wine

 I Hear/Bread and Wine

(“Or do you not know this about yourselves: that Jesus Christ is in you.” 2 Corinthians 13:5b)

At this point it is so hard to remember
chocolate or
guitar songs with my clan
or
warm beaches with my toes in the sand.

(I am in no mood for stoic meditations. Some
days it’s so easy,
but mostly I’ve forgotten.)

I don’t mean to be grumpy or
self-indulgent or
sorry for my plight.
I just wish I got get-well cards
from someone
other than my
nurses.

My house is cozy,
my family loves me,
but I am lonely
inside these days that pass
while I breathe and
eat and
live and
sleep
under the radar.

My soul is taxed,
my brain no match for the bass drum
of days that advance without my permission.
At this point
(let me make it clear)
Christ is more than all
while I wonder why the snow falls
so late this year.

Today the hours taunt me with self-made
stories
and the sadnesses I remember.

And then I hear, yes, only faintly,
the bread and the wine and the
voice that has never minded my questions:

“Remember me.”

A Venue you Habited

A Venue you Habited 

(“The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in His hands.” John 3:35)

Have you ever returned to a chosen space, a venue you habited like the moon
in its cycles? Have you glanced upon the stone where once you sat
to abbreviate the world’s long pages? Your eye scanned the horizon;

The west was endless from the butte’s vantage; a river running and rising
as June supplied its capacity from the peaks well past August.

The east was a yellow hillside wedge with jonquil and bluebell punctuation.
Sometimes the children were occupied with hikes and journeys while your
heart,
aligned with the routine,
found comfort in the pattern as all life finds in the seasons.

So, for 20 years you visited, weeks divided by two;
for 20 years you sat and painted your methods;
for 20 years you kept a liturgy of hours, your prayer rope
a comfort when thoughts twirled like gutters and words
echoed against the abyss.

Then came the pain. Unruly, you continued your routine. 
But the pain allowed less contemplation as it captured your
best assets and imprisoned them well beyond the reach of your
shortened range.

The pain stayed. Five years in the experts ran out of tricks,
the rabbits had escaped, the wand was broken, and the magician’s cape
was a threadbare anachronism while you grabbed the theater rails
to exit the building when your last hope when up in flames.

The stone still sits atop the butte, the river still swells in 
summer’s comma before the fall. But you

Are adrift, the doldrums have stopped every measure of time.
You wonder what power, now eight years unpinned from
the calendar’s rhythm, might stir the waters again,
send you to the one unchanging habit that defined

Your delineation from every other footprint maker.

A Father, you hoped to accelerate your best to leave your
children arcs and panoramas before you left to rest.

Dreamed-Up

Dreamed-Up

(“Jesus replied, ‘Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them. We will come to them and make our home with them.’” John 14:23)

She woke up and thought she would write some words
to the one person she had refused her words for
five years and more. And then the words were only
the sudden hope of manufactured miracles,
the quick passing of canned words strengthened by seeing
it

All in a dream.

While he had suffered for seven years, the pain building
like a slow ascent up a Mexican pyramid, or the steep hills
you hike
that appear as one short jaunt until sightlines break the ridge
to see
more and more hills ahead; and in your periphery. More hills that
eventually end upon a plateau of pain; a restless place where

Each day drowns you underneath its angry intent of
shoving every thought out of a once active brain,
and your habits are soggy and sweat from the energy consumed
attempting to beat back the welding pen that has engraved “pain”
upon every movement of your body.

But she (who could challenge her motives) merely sent a “word”
that dreamed up a prophetic announcement that all his pain would
be finished soon.

And he would like an ear, for she would not bear to hear that, in a month
or a year,
the season had remained, the pain still plunging him helplessly
beyond anyone’s comprehension

Except God’s alone.