Everything You Wanted

Everything You Wanted

(“No servant can serve two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” Luke 16:13)

Have you gotten everything you wanted;
have you wasted your time wanting more?
Have you stashed it away from prying conquest;
have you labeled it for later use?
Sooner or later the accounts will be settled;
credit will be given to the poorest and debts
cancelled in a single
day.

How many days have you set aside:
how many shiny coins are stored in a tin can
in the dark?
Or did you spend it all on diamond swatches
of tomorrow’s greed?
Did the seeds of your discontent
burst like moss too heavy on your winter roof?

What tastes have you acquired:
what timing for this brief untimely stay?
Can we share coffee or give away new
slices of cake?
Can we agree that we want more than will
every satisfy our perceived needs?
Why don’t we leave our opulent windows
and doors
to move outside where the ground is level and
where the poor man sits all alone?
Why don’t we join the resistance,
pool our resources, and swim against the tide?
Why don’t we give away what we will
never entirely consume? Why don’t we
offer our silence against the selfish voices
of rage?

Everything I Wanted

Everything I Wanted

(“Aren’t two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s consent.” Matthew 10:29)

There was everything I wanted just inside
the pair of eyes
pre-empting professional conventions.
Who knows, if you can hear me,
whether words stay glued near me or
break through space and time like
electrons escaping the strong force at
elemental levels.

You told me your story between questions about
my health.
I think we could talk forever, but my insurance covers
only an hour, I think. I should have brought coffee as
a write-off. Between laughs and family angst,
we talked about my pain, my usual topic for our
appointments. And we talked about grief, the subject
that, it seems,
has made me a doula in this latter time.

I went late to lunch and the server asked about my
pain. She always does. And it comforts me. She stays
at my table moments longer than any other and wonders
how I do it. And I wonder too.

There were surprises, two tacos, a beer,
and a friend walking in with new music
for me to hear.
Our shirts matched, imagine that, two sky-blue
guayaberas. He and his friends sat as I exited
the restaurant that feels like home.

Everything I’ve wanted is in this village. The doves
lift their steel gray wings perching on branches as Autumn
paints an earth scene to surround them. I wish I knew their names,
and I would tell them my pain is eased for just a moment
as they sit exposed just outside my window.

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.

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.

An Epistle, a Prayer

 

An Epistle, a Prayer

(“In order to set us free from this present evil age, Christ gave himself for our sins, in obedience to the will of our God and Father.” Galatians 1:4)

Dear Jesus,
having set us free from the present evil age,
it makes me wonder why
so many of your disciples use
bullying and
sometimes billy clubs
to get your point across.

I know, Jesus,
this has caused such a poor reflection on you
that many have twisted every bit of wrath out
of any graceful act you performed. And, honestly,
I have been scorned for suggesting we pause a bit
in our
list of sins that we no longer participate in. We know
damn well
most of our inclinations did not change the
moment we decided that a rearrangement was in
order. We dined at camps where the noise level
made us slink out to the bench behind the tabernacle
just to rest. Just to rest. Just to refresh
and rewash our ears
from the assault of decibels that convinced
most everybody else
that the holyghost was soon to appear. Yes,
my tear stains are on that carpeted stage as well.

But Jesus,
the one time I stayed quietly in my pew while angry
men and
women who wore it well
dragged seatmates and cousins to their knees before
the cacophony right in front of the evangelist’s feet,
the one time I sat tight halfway back
I was accused of quenching the spirit.
(All I wanted was to peacefully meet with you,
Jesus,
without the sound and sweat and salty tears
writing my script.)

And yet I cannot argue, Jesus,
the present age has much evil,
and you, in love of humanity and
humility of private conversations,
you absorbed the violence that

The state sponsored

That

The religionists supported

and

The crowd roared in scorn

While

Disciples fled

And

The women stayed to the end.

My dear Jesus,
may your church,
the one which storms the gates of the dead,
be delivered once again
from this white-ghost addiction
to spelling out the sharper notes of
everyone else’s sin.

LIke a Trial Balloon

 

Like a Trial Balloon

(“Rejoice greatly, people of Jerusalem! Shout for joy, people of Jerusalem! Your king is coming to you. He does what is right, and he saves. He is gentle and riding on a donkey, on the colt of a donkey.” Zechariah 9:9)

I wanted today to be soft like a trial balloon,
but it was crunchy like leftover bits of tortilla chips.
And still it had the trademark of the divine all over it.

I wanted today to be glistening like a birthday cake,
but it was scratchy like acne or poison ivy.
Yet still it had the maker’s mark identifying it.

I wanted today to be back slaps and victory songs,
bass lines and jazz vibes,
but it was castoffs and headline pain,
backward lyrics and notes between the lines.

The author, the known and unknowable,
wrote the copyright
in script that spoke
so little
I knew it was meant for me.

All Anyone Wanted

All Anyone Wanted

(“Feast there in the Presence of God, your God. Celebrate everything that you and your families have accomplished under the blessing of God, your God.” Deuteronomy 12:7 [The Message])

 

His choices once were boundless, the wideness of time and
the land spread before him like a queen’s banquet on her
coronation day.

There was nothing to hint in the air or the sky
or the pizza late night games with a dozen young dreamers
and their children fast asleep--
there was nothing to hint that many would not see him again until
he finally was on the ground.

 

How had he fallen among the dark shadows begging for longer hours
and brand new bread? Why was the daylight so slanted,
the help he was handed so ghostly, the glances interpreted
as holes in his shirts and acne in his soul?

 

From the time he hit the dirt until he accepted his
next invitation,
he only sat with children whose sense of invention
held him steady in the embarrassment that his poetry
no longer rhymed. The adults spread out in tables of eight
and he laughed with babies with deviled egg on their faces.

 

There was a cradle that held parts of him
he could not explain. There was a toddler in a playpen
babbling his name. And so he knelt in the corner,
eye to eye with one
who knew the ground as well as he.
He never knew what to say when the one adult
across from him made it two at the table. Words
were stumbling and sometimes stuck sideways
in his throat.

 

But still he craved the fire, still he wanted to go where
the flames wrapped each word with smoked goodness
and the embers never died until well after dawn.

 

He never knew what to say when it was only two
at the table,
but the food they offered, the drink they poured
opened portals of the spirit. The babies and children
laughed harder and the adults did not mind.

 

Eventually he discovered a real live giver,
another breather with his same misgivings and
realized
all anyone wanted was a meal on a paper plate
beside the kitchen door.