Before my Memory

Before my Memory

(“Let my whole being bless the Lord and never forget all his good deeds:” Psalm 103:2)

Renew my remembrance, let your righteous deeds shine
through the clouds. Tap me on the shoulder and I’ll
turn around to see the face that has called me child from
before my memory, from before your kindness entered my dreams
and flooded my mornings with sunny reminders of love.
I must confess,
I remember less your benefits than I feel yellow jackets
bumping across my brain renaming every panic I ever
felt from yes and no. There was a day when everything felt
like dancing. And the next day I fell exhausted onto the floor.

If I could put my finger on it, if I could wrap my brain around it,
if I could memorize the words that set me free and included
every possibility of wholeness, If I could refrain from the
ennui that settles like fog before the sun burns it away.

My soul has felt weightless only to fall to earth again
smashed against the gorges by gravity. Time set me up
like an unconscious answer to questions that were never asked.

Why can’t I say I’m just not feeling it without
guilt flooding the spaces around me? Where are the words
I pledged to you just moments ago?
Something strums my heartstrings and threatens to send
vibrations deeper inside the thoughts that belong to you.

But you have melted my anxiety before, turned my cavern days
into fields of grain. It still seems out of balance, it still feels untrue,
to spout words of expectancy when my heart is colored so blue.
I’ll live through these days with my imperfections on display;
I’ll look for you behind every shadow and skip the cliches.
I’ll listen long enough for clouds to scatter and to help me remember
the moments you’ve met me unexpectedly.

Imagine Falling

Imagine Falling

(“Then Moses and the Levite religious leaders said to all Israel, ‘Be quiet and listen, O Israel! This day you have become the people of the Lord your God.’” Deuteronomy 27:9)

Imagine falling weightless in a slow spin into
a wide well that has no end;
bottomless and you find you have no more
need for air.

The silent liquid surrounds your every bend
and every wrinkle. Like a dream floating far above
the landscape below guided by the movement of the air,
your mass and the liquid’s are equal.

Imagine you fall without fear or reflex, bathed by
the warmth more solid than your usual air.
Each and every pore is filled, the entire scan of your skin;
more visible than air, your eyes do not burn. Every strand of hair
waves the slow tempo, the legato arc that, for this
imagined time
denies gravity’s demands, forgets calendar commands
while safely framed by beauty’s fantasy.

Imagine you stay much longer than you intended; an hour,
an evening, a day; and you recall the water (though it was not
water at all), now seemed like millions of molecules held together
by little more than a handshake. And the longer you stayed, the more
you sensed,
the liquid, the well, your skin were less foreign than you knew.

When we imagine that which is true, there is no other expectation
than that which we’ve known from the beginning. The Water
giving life and nourishing; the Joy stronger than death and
drenching our stubborn souls completely covered in Love.