Even Though They Follow

 

Even Though They Follow

(“I pray that You will forgive the sin of this people by the greatness of Your loving-kindness.” Numbers 14:19a)

Even though they follow you to find your hiding places,
even though they memorize every shadow,
even though they look away when you pass,
even though never call--

What they love is far less than you possess.

Even when they throw their eolian axes,
even when they are dead-set against your phantoms,
even when they insist demons inhabit your groaning,
even when they do not share their air with you—

What they breathe would toxify your alpine breath.

Even now your heart is aching, hanging on,
like the last leaf on the tree near the end of November.
Even now your mind is racing, spinning wheels,
like cobbled spokes on a wooden buggy;
Even now your tears are hidden, budding out,
like the first rose of the season, life is in your eyes.
Even now your words are measured, immobile,
like a frog caught in your throat longing for the pond.

Even though the days labor slower than midafternoon,
even though the ice steals your hopes and freezes them dry,
even though the mask you wear was placed there by others,
even though they know not what they do—

What you fear is displacement.
But you,
you, are the beautiful, though pained;
the treasured, though stolen;
the rare, though overlooked by all except

The rest of us who have learned that to ache
with another
is the highest affection of all.

Spinning a Narrative

Spinning a Narrative

(“I know what you have done, and that you are neither cold nor hot.” Revelation 3:15)

I would listen and, knowing what others
had said they had heard,
would scar my soul over the silence that
did not flow
but was the weight of summer obscurity.

I thought my sight was blurred,
my ears unhearing the very thing
I wished to find.

Lock me in my room, and do not let me out
until I’ve spent the night in the sweetest reverie
I’ve read about from men of old,
women like angels told,
and stories unfolded by names I heard quoted
at meetings of the devoted.

I paced, I read, I played three chords;
instead of songs or lengthy prayer
my eyelids like lead scratched my waiting watch.

I was certain no one had longed as deeply as I,
yet there was only the shallow dribble of my own mind’s
constant turbine spinning a narrative that has followed from
then until now. What I believed, hope and sought was
never as glowing as
the fireside stories; of parables in street shoes
and the buried treasure always discovered for the effort.

I have chased You, only Father, not well. I am tired,
I am weary, I have gone this far on this tiny soul’s
capacity alone.

Let me rest now, my breath is shallow. The rain has beat
upon the windows through the night
and the puddles are deep in the sunken footprints

Of a man who carried a mislaid burden much too far
up the mountain.

And yet the tears remind me there is so much love
I could never be satisfied, never filled, never stalling;
for the laying down of my burden is the only action
that leaves no footprints for the torrents to fill.

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.