All He Wanted Was to Know His Name

All He Wanted Was to Know His Name

(“That’s why the spring was called, ‘The Well of the Living One who Looks after Me.’” Genesis 16:14a)

He side-stepped into town; didn’t want his face to be seen.
He stepped over every crack, carried dried bread in his pockets.
He was from another country, he rarely heard his own language.
His face was crusted like a coal miner’s map. He never liked
being watched. He would step into the shadows. He never liked
being asked where he was from, or how he got to where he was.
Every road was different, every meal the same. All he wanted was
silence.
All he wanted was to know his name.
He watched for movement behind the trees, limbs that moved against
the breeze. He listened for snapping twigs, for whispers, for a
stray dog’s bark, or perhaps the sun and shadow colliding just ahead.
No one knew him. No one ever did. He moved through time,
past tilting billboards, around rail stations abandoned like scarecrows
in the desert.
He read every cloud. He rehearsed every line of the day. He memorized
all he had forgotten from the day before.
Suspended in the space between nearly and always,
he rarely stopped. The future was inevitable. Dust devils
were the only messengers of god he knew.

Then his luck ran out. His tank was empty. His feet curled in on themselves,
his brain sought the solace of shade and croaking frogs beside a
farmer’s duck pond. He let his guard down. He let the spare breath
he had
form words he feared. He saw the eyes that saw him. He saw the feet
moving gently along the bank. He heard the voice, light and translucent,
that only said (he shivered)

I see you.

It was a child’s voice. They were darting eyes that saw everything. They
came from the sky and the dandelions at the same time, these eyes that
belonged to everyone. And he let his breath go to

Fill the void he had left behind him.

These Silent Days

 

These Silent Days

These silent days can be interrupted
by
a woodpecker rehearsing for the Spring.
And then, more often,
they are punctuated with sobs from the
hollow of distant grief and aches.
Life can turn cruel without our knowing,
a decade passes and chop block houses line
the field where mustard and poppies once grew.
Life can be sweetened for an hour,
a meal, a hug, a dog nuzzling at your elbow.
The air is heavier
the fewer people in the room.
Half a day later and the dishes are cleared,
loneliness creeps in uninvited
but is so familiar you put out a chair for him.
And though the buzz of life once flew like geese,
like bees,
the silence now hangs over the hours.
Before, now, and after, it is the way it always
has been.

The Life Oozed

The Life Oozed

(“Then Jesus shouted, ‘Lazarus, come out!’” John 11:43)

For ten minutes the life oozed between the molecules
of a well-ripened apple. Tasting like honey and
summer hay,
headaches (always invisible), ceased their
unwelcome battering upon my door.

(Do you know the sort of caller,
usually a friend, who climbs your front porch
and pounds the door like a boxer working the bag?
“I needed to ask you a question,” as if I was in the
back quarters of a mansion giving last minute instructions
to the servants about the banquet’s menu later in the day.
Then you watch them drive away, wishing they had known
you were in the front room of your bungalow with the
television turned low.)

For ten minutes life tasted like rain and thunder,
dog’s breath and wonder, all ready to go to waste
unless enjoyed before the bruises on the apple
remind you of the cycle
of the seed’s death and the fruit’s life,
of the fruit’s death and the seed’s burial,
inedible until the season circles again.

For half a week the tomb gobbled God’s own
possession,
dead and stiff, wrapped tighter than a cocoon,
a cadaver too soon. Yet, just like the
tiny pellets the size of hatpins, packed full
of all the life necessary to raise a tree to the sky,
lading its branches with fruit dangling so low
the children reach the sweet orbs of joy,
and springing new buds for decade upon
decade; like that tiny inkling, an ugly
kernel that seems a harlequin of death;

The body of Lazarus waits on the word
that calls life from the haphazard meeting of
husks and grain, mud and water, sunshine and
wind to paint the fields with wildflowers
and fruit trees without the help of a single
human finger.

The body of Lazarus, the body of us all,
depends upon the shout, the call to rise,
and rise it must

For it is the Creator who calls.

About Time

About Time

(“The Lord is good to all, and has compassion on all he has made.” Psalm 145:9)

It was about time the rain stopped, about time the sun held sway
against yesterday’s angry skies. Nearly everyone noticed:
walking dogs, barking seals, daffodils budging above the clods;
a sweet dulcimer with soft hammered songs,
mowers buzz-cutting their shaggy lawns,
children squeal, sunlight heals, dancing blooms bestowed applause.

It was about time, we had waited to see the signs of relief,
each blistering gale that grabbed branches like swords,
ripped roof tiles and aimed them like discs toward the hills
decorated with debris. It was about time the lights came on

Where one could see burrows beneath fallen limbs,
bell-flowers awake and yawning misty investiture of Spring.

What if we are Hand-made? What if we are hard copy original,
a single-run print of a Grand idea that could never be repeated?
What if, just like sculptor’s work in wood, we are perfect and marred;
would we, unalarmed, love the art that left signature cuts rugged
and against the grain?

When the sun and breeze meet together where the seal couple
arrive each year about this time, listen to the miniature waves
hit the stones and lose some time wondering about music’s rhythm,
watercolor’s suspense, creation’s timing and the sheer nonsense of

Poetry’s thin attempts of anything concrete at all.

Any Day

Any Day

(“Look! The winter has passed, the winter rains are over and gone.” Song of Solomon 2:11)

Any day the tides may turn, the storms cease their
constant refrain along the easements of unsettled minds.
The thoughts once frozen can surely thaw,
the bristly sleet will warm to glad sheets of rain,
the day will begin early again.

We have heard the announced arrival, the blizzard
whistling down the gorge, the roar hugging the coulees,
and the doors slamming shut until the icy wind
and stinging snow have built their glistening lean-tos on
every western exposure.

We double down on comforters and hot chocolate.

But the day when the last snow shrivels, the final rain withers,
we hardly remember the hardships of winter. The daffodils
burst like butter, the lilacs perfume the ripening breeze,
while miscellaneous floes beg the inlets and shadows.

The first day of bare-feet, t-shirts and Dairy Queen
erases the hard reckoning that wears out our heavy coats.
The second week in a row we have to water the roses
we know no other season than the one when love is
likely to whisper. The girl with the braids
sees the boy with the braces for the first time since
Spring sang its arrival clear.