My Pace is Slower

My Pace is Slower

(“The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.” Genesis 32:31)

I never wanted to slow down. I never wanted to lose the race.
I was the fastest in my class; well, faster than the fastest girl.
And that was saying something, she could outrun most of us.
But I was always middle of the pack with the boys, until, in
high school,
I ran a mile backwards just to prove I could do it. Track and Field
had no such event.

I did not slow my pace. Books ran through my fingers like water.
I sold snow skis and Levis, I sold office desks and stacks of invoices.

I raced across the Midwest. Gathered youth from towns in Oklahoma
to lock-ins and car washes, to altar calls and crowded basements. We
marched downtown, prayed for professors, and packed them in on
Friday nights with free popcorn and sodas. But

I was a school bus without a driver. I was grasping for something lighter
than the dark and leaden way my heart left me in the middle and at the end
of every race. But I kept up the pace. I tried to measure my winnings by
the smiles I counted everywhere I went.

And then the bus crashed. The leaden darkness broke through my
paper skin onto nearly everyone I knew. I had not wrestled with God.
I had not tried to wrestle with myself. (Or maybe someone wrestled with me.)
The stress and success were
butterflies that flew the nest upon the first falling snow.

Rest/unrest. Strong-arm/weak-mind. Smooth takeoff/crash landing.
Days of running track became decades of wanting to take it all back.

I’ve stubbed my toe trying to get up. I’ve falling on my face into the
red dust of the oval track. I’ve cut my feet running barefoot on gravel.
I’ve unraveled in the wind while everyone was watching.

My pace is slower. I limp when it is cold. Some days I feel like
I’ve climbed a mountain with no way down. Others I am grateful
to walk around the marina, near the river, smelling the fish station
and salt. I walk the same route and do not care if I ever walk like
an athlete
again.

Pace and Patter

Pace and Patter

Just around the bend where the trees greet the
river’s corner in obeisance; this is where the daylight
reminds me of the afternoons that
passed far too fast,
the conversations that began so haltingly,
like a long freight train leaving the station,
then gathered speed until the pace and patter of every
sentence
felt like the rhythms of life itself.

Sometimes your eyes captured mine and I simply enjoyed
your voice’s décor while the meaning poured past my perception.
While the light caught the coffee hue, your eyes were
my new therapy. Your invitation kept us in sweet captivity
into the opening afternoon.

Words fell upon words like leaves dance from the trees
in long lazy spirals, barely moved by ghosts or zephyrs,
circling each other and holding tightly their invisible hands.Our sentences were chains of campfire smoke, exploring easily

the air above our heads, the branches held out in open invitation.

And so we explored every question we ever raised,
every commitment we phrased to love or duty,
to friendship and beauty.  And the wisps of our explorations
did not collide in cast-iron conflagrations, but built more
solid for our uncertainties.

There were a few who, sitting apiece in the same place,
upon the same rock, with the same view and
same sun with shade,
rays and shadow made to open the soul to exploration;
with solid argument and booked definitions, broke our conversation
into pieces upon the forest floor. We perhaps talked a half hour;
never more.

But you (and all, and many, and one) knew there was no bite
in our spiced exchanges; only soul and soul in lucid uncertainty
becoming what we hoped, and know now, what it could be;
only love’s best friendship in all its freehand splendor.

"I Promised"

“I Promised”
(for Bob and Virginia)

Look how long he carries her, see how drawn
his face is.
She does not eat, she will not sip the water
coagulated so it will not slip down her throat
left helpless by the massive stroke.

Look how he longs for her, see how far
the words fly.
He cannot speak, he will not give in to the
mocking swarms of angry words that slip dribbling
not from his heart but from his throat.

“I promised God I would care for her,
I promised Him in sickness and health.
I promised God, I know He heard me,
I promised Him, where is His promised help?”

Catching the late afternoon shadows that leave
sharp silhouettes against the pale green siding,
he pushes her wheelchair (it is no burden;
she is a tiny bird in a nest). He pushes her wheelchair
to the deck facing south; their favorite place
forever. Over half their lives, nearly half a century,
they have watched the highway from gravel to asphalt.

He pushes her to the second pew from the back,
her chair fits neatly in the aisle; and they hold hands
from announcements to benediction. She is greeted so
sweetly by the circle of hands that touch hers, touch his;
their tears wet the fingers of each laying on of hands.

Look how long He carries them; see how He watches
their rising and sitting. Do you notice how He slows
His own pace to meet their shuffling gait?

No one pens their ending or beginning,
no one chooses the timing either way.
I am sure he would write
her and his final silence
at just the right time,
at just the same time, asleep
to awaken
hand-in-hand beyond the river
in the New Land neither rushed or lagging.

They hear the Voice they know kept them waiting,
and hear His “well-done” like a trumpet call of dawn.