Ragged Time

for Eve Shelnutt

We filled our days
with church, she
swathed babies and

I swept the Narthex,
on Sundays she sang
alto, I was acolyte,

there were matins
and vespers, missions
to migrant camps,

we filled our souls
with piety and truth,
devout offerings --

these were not
acts of faith but
acts of belief.

Summer days I
walked her home
past the swamp and

heaps of smoldering
mattresses and
tires curling pillars

of smoke, rotting
cabbages and
magazines, we

walked the valley
of shadow wasps
and dragonflies

as ashes rained
down on us and
the cattails--we

we were too young
for the body's
blessing to serve,

forsaken as all
must be before
suffering holiness.

More of Something

I woke up to the sound of nothing, really, and that's the problem.

I can't hear myself, or nothing else, for that matter, but there were no dream ghosts, no Debussy, no dark Mahler, no existential pulse.

[Now... I need to start thinking.... Who is this character? What is the story he propels? I have the beginning of a mystery, a conflict.... Where does it want to go? What does he need to do? What is his story? Where will it go?]

Beginning of Something

Here it is 18 degrees. It snowed all day and night.
So this morning, when I awoke, it was still dark. The world glowed with a radiance that only a new snow can give. A crystalline luminescence, a dream.
I did not sleep, but listened to the snow falling, and all the emptiness. Ashes falling to earth and landing with a hiss. I could feel them on my naked flesh, star ashes, cold and searing, even under my comforter I could not get warm. I shivered and sweat and worried in the glittering light.


Night sweats.


So here I am, sitting here, looking out the window, drinking coffee, and this is what I know.
It is 18 degrees.
It snowed last night, all day yeserday.
The cedars are bent and sagging.
Everything has shrunk.
The powerlines have drooped, the birch tree snapped.
The sun is pouring in, blinding me.
I am staring out at all of this brightness, this resplendence, and I can't bear my own breath, can't bear that gust of snow sworling just outside the window pane, that squirrel gnawing at the plastic lawn chair. I cannot feel my cold feet.
I have missed three weeks of work. I yanked the phone cord from the wall. The sink is stacked with pans of Beefaroni.
I shivered all night.
Why didn't I get another blanket?
Why didn't I sleep beside the radiator?
I could not move.


These are the facts. The cold hard facts.
I am so tired of the facts.

Summer Solstice 2007

This solstice is absurd!
The day stretches beyond
our minds... catbirds and
cardinals, ecstatic or
confused, keep singing as
new patches of time erupt
in jubilance, the sky
never quite darkens, you
can hear children squabbling
about vegetables, freight
cars groaning from the valley,
church bells at all hours,
insect clicks and buzzings,
ridiculous laughter,
bootylicious howls and jests,
bawdy moans and cries,
green maple swellings, ripe-
bellied gibes and the mocking
bawlings of crows swaying
in the sun-splashed
tree tops. Who is that
lusty comic swinging
naked atop the dawn?

for Bob Riegert

He is The Hanging Judge,
The Great Abnegater,

The God-Who-Always-Says-No

There's never been a case
He didn't deny or reject

There is no pleasing Him

no way to earn His love,
no escape from His wrath

there is no coup, no revolt

no rebellion, no way to
overthrow this Dark Lord.



The only way to survive
this life is to install

your own appellate judge

someone who can speak to
the jury, plead your case, some

Great Adjudicator,

Someone who will take your
side, tell your story, trust

you at your word, take you

on faith alone. Tell me,
who else in your life

will do that for you?

Who else will listen to you,
embrace your soul, and love

only you?

Beach Party Dalliance

On the drive to the beach, the caravan
stops at a roadside stand for strawberries--

we feed them to each other through the windows
like baby birds in a nest gulping for more!

The berries are incredibly sweet and ripe,
they burn the lips and tongue like honeyed nectar,

when we reach the beach and climb the sand
our bodies are no longer ours, but the young

lovers we were forty years ago, the quick
and confused, the swift moving and randy-fleshed,

we laze across the warm scalloped sand,
casual as teenagers aching for love

and yet cautious as parents, mindful to
build a fire but daring to swim trembling

in icy water. We are a band of exiles,
gypsies, a woman in a sari and her

two Nigerian children, another woman
with silver rings on her fingers and a tie-dye

dress that flutters in the wind lke a peacock's tail,
she tells everyone at the campfire that "it's

destiny that we meet", her chestnut eyes
staring wide, waiting for someone to fill them.

Both women are hauntingly beautiful
on the shore, they are looking for men to

make them whole, they have known men who are cruel,
both are looking for women who will understand,

who will bear witness to the truth of their lives,
but they seem haunted, unreal, unsure of what

the evening will bring next after the hotdogs
charred on sticks and the bags of potatos chips

and crispy asian slaw. The men scatter
across the sand bare-chested in the cool wind,

all sunburnt and squint-eyed, playing frisbee
while the kids dive across the sand desperately

trying to catch up. The sun slowly sinks
over the lake, slowly succumbing to

layers of lavender and peach and plum.
The last of the sailboats sag in along the

hollyhocks and roses and soon the faintest
stars and the crescent moon rises. We all

circle around the campire drinking cabernet
and asti, the glowing orange embers and bury

our flesh in the sand, for the air is now
cold, and without partners, the loneliness

is hard...were we younger and licking these
smores off our fingers we'd be licking each

other's fingers, hugging each other, and
disappearing into the hollows of

the dunes. As it is we must pleasure ourselves
with a glimpse of skin, the memory of

a voice, the gooseflesh fraised from an ardent
glance of her leg kicking up from the sand,

his chest tightening as he ran, how her hair
glistened in the sun when she left the water,

how his hand felt when he offered to help
her rise from the driftwood. Then, after midnight,

how we all blunder through the cold,
happy for a hooded sweatshirt and a

slice of cherry pie, the crust spinkled with sugar,
to sit out on the grass of the motel lawn

and count the stars glittering over the deep sky.
This is the loneliness of our lives, the

unbearably sweet and haunting aloneness
that we carry. Another day's longing,

another day of longing!

Solstice 2007

I missed it this
year, totally
whiffed, thought it was
today and then
looked at the date.
How can you miss
the shortest day of
the year? It does
not matter, the
world was shrouded
in fog, so there
was no way to
trace the long shadows
or the thin sun.
In truth I spent
the day sleeping
and writing a poem
about the longest
day of the year,
an irony, if
you will, perhaps
like the poem itself,
I was writing
about the death of
the Big Au Suble
River when it
turns out its more
of a sandy creek,
I was recalling
the end of love
when I remembered
it was really
the rebirth of
desire.

At the Mouth of the Big Au Sauble River

This is no great river by any stretch!
No, it dies a slow and easy death
in the sandy shoals of Lake Michigan.

You can wade across the river mouth
in fifteen, maybe twenty steps, the water
is clear and the bottom smooth scalloped sand,

it feels as luscious as an oyster or
the pink skin of a conch, sacred in its
shallows, then heaved up unceremonious

on a sandbar as it pushes deeper
into our souls. A lone fisherman casts
into the shadows, for what?, good luck?,

there's no fish lurking here, only nervous
gulls murmuring at the water's edge
and waterlogged driftwood, and as the sun

sets in its honeyed lavenders and mango
pomegranates and sweet cherries, sure enough
here come the beachcombers in their sombreros

and serapes and pedal pushers,
laughing, nuzzling, kissing and holding hands.
The water is warm and indifferent, pagan,

a quiet rapture. This is, after all,
the ordinary, our love dying off.
We came here not to renew but to be

reborn.

TUESDAY

Trapped behind my
window panes I

watched the city
slump into winter,

all morning the sky
darkened and the

sullen river stared
back, anxious,

an old wound.
Finally, we could

no longer stand it!
The snow fell in

wet gobs! Big globs!
Fist-sized ashes

filled the air, a
miracle! Great

clumps of star-stuff!
Globs of nuclear wonder!

Incredible chunks
of phenomena!

it was the world
transformed, the sky,

the river, the city
and the lovely

snow, I felt
I loved all this

lovely dying,
this lovely

praying, the end
of the world.

PINK: Walking For the Cure

thinking of Ellen Vincent


1.

Remember that moment,
all of those women, survivors,
dressed in pink and roses, standing
on the stone steps for their photograph,
radiant, shimmering, an ecstasy, a riot,
as if at any moment they might burst
into star-ash rapture, an unspeakable
Pentecost!


2.

Last year we walked out
into the cold morning, a flood
of people fanning out from the city
and spilling into the harbor.
The faces of those returning
were careworn, tired, lost in memory,
and if transfigured by the walk
and the shimmering, the sun
glittering off the lake, cold
for the season, sails sagging
in the listless air.


3.

This year is harder.
There are so may things we
cannot say or do, so many things we
dare not say or do. This year
we walk in the sun, as if
we are alone and yet we are surrounded
by survivors, friends and lovers,
children and mothers, thousands,
each of us thoughtful, each of us
carrying some name, some memory,
some prayer, some fierce grip
on what we hold most precious,
that star-ash rapture!, a radiance we
cannot betray.

Hay Season

She has butterscotch lips
that tremble in her sleep.

Summer nights I stare
at her breathing in shadows,

moonlight, warm wind,
curtains billowing -- is this

the woman I love?
Anyone I know?

I study the hollows
of her eyes, the luna moth

fluttering at her hallowed
breasts, her neck, the church bell

tolls, a freight train moans
from the valley. I have

prayed for this so long,
the honeyed air, melon

ripe, the gleanings,
again.

Demurrage

At dawn the yardboss gave us
orders, another boxcar of cedar
or redwood or yellow pine or fir,
it never mattered, it had to be
unloaded, it was just a matter of
what shape it was in, sometimes the bands
held and the bunks were neat and tight and
it was just a matter of dancing with
the forklift. If the bands snapped or if
the cars were banged or shunted
and the lumber jammed and disheveled,
I crawled under the corrugated steel roof
and pried and levered and kicked the wood
free, sending it one plank at a time
out the side door onto rollers where it
shot out onto the truck and Bryan grabbed it
and dropped it with a slap onto the truck.
It was punishing work, the boxcars
retained the heat they collected across the west,
the steel seared my flesh and the air smelt of baked
bum shit and rotting vegetables scorched our lungs.
Those cars were clusterfucks, we fought them all day
with crowbars and hammers and chain saws
just to wedge free tons of wood jammed and pressed
against steel, at lunch we quenched our thirst
with cold beer and smoked weed just to fuck ourselves up
in the heat, then back to the boxcars and the
fucking wood and the yardboss would stop by
banging the steel door with a two-by-four telling us
to get the fucker unloaded, he had another two piled up
and the demurrage was killing him. By sundown
we’d get to the bottom of the car, unloading
20 foot planks and feed them onto the rollers
and we could sweep out the car and call it quits
when we’d check out the walls, read what
hieroglyphics or poems or epitaphs
or pentagrams were scrawled there
on the busted plywood and steel walls
by the bums and tramps and hobos and drifters
who inhabited these cars These were
inscrutable truths scratched out in chalk
and rust, shit and blood, we found them frightening,
like evil charms, oaths, curses on us, on anyone
who beheld those mysterious signs.
Stoned and spent, stupid from the heat,
we wanted more than our fear of the flattened
cans of peaches, the busted glass from their
Old Crow and the ashes from their fires,
we wanted another history, another story,
another tangle of events. Maybe
the next car would hold the key.

C O N S C I O U S N E S S. 3.0

Written in Lake Geneva, Spring, 2007


The boss gave me the Rose House that year, a
rickety A-frame of rotted wood and dirt floor
sheathed in visqueen. In winter I stuffed plastic
pots with dirt and root stock, 100's, 1000's,
each indistinguishable, row after row of thorn-
studded crotches. I spent afternoons alone
in the dead air consigned to Voodoo and Gypsy,
Perfume Delight and Perfect Moment,
Summer's Kiss and Sweet Surrender,
day after day until the dying light of March
swelled to April and the first purple tendrils
shot up like furious antlers and soon
the Rose House swelled with green lush
and the air sweetened and wavered
with its own irresistible narcotic
paradise, I succumbed to this forced
Spring, my flesh burnt with the sun
and the first buds fired my soul,
they opened slowly at first, gentle
friends of lavender and crimson,
then bottle rockets of brilliant
tiger-striped passion and strawberries
and cream, reckless peach and blood orange.
That summer I dreamy of luscious-
lipped women, sweet, full-lipped
women, women whose breasts smelt
of lilacs and roses, of honeysuckle and
mockorange, whose hair fell like
wisteria vine and clematis and wild
rambling roses, I was not tormented
by love so much as enchanted by love,
astonished by love, the idea of love,
I took a knife and slit the visqueen
skin and peeled it back off the swinging
ribs and the sun and wind swept
over the roses, I felt as if my life
had somehow come to a end,
even the bruised sky and lightning
could not frighten me. For days
I rode the perfumed air and nights
I slept under stars of color
and rode the wave of beauty opening
everywhere, it seemed. How could any
of this be happening to me? How could I
stand such a life, stand another moment
of such wonder? How could I not
dare another?

C O N S C I O U S N E S S. 2.0

Last night I dreamt
I was starring once again
in the Red Barn's production
of Hamlet, of all things,
waiting in the dark wings,
adjusting my princely
costume when a stagehand
asked me where I've been
all these weeks of rehearsal
and, staring at the Danish
night fog I think, what the hell?,
it's opening night and I've
somehow done it again,
missed out on all the
walk-throughs and preparations,
and as I walk on stage
I look for the prompter's cues,
there's no time for anything
but the stage of my life,
my story, and these people
in the darkness reading
their programs, gasping,
I stare out at the Danish
ghosts and open my mouth
and syllables stumble
forth, as if I almost
know what to say, it's
a clumsy performance, line
by painful line, each one
a surprise, bungled soliloquies,
clodhopping verbal sparrings,
the fencing scenes are
pathetic but somehow
the audience buys all this
method madness to the point
when I'm nicked by Laertes'
blade and the cold poison
rushes through my blood, I
fall hard to the wood stage
floor, the stage lights blur,
my mind howls like some
unvanquished ghost fading,
I can hear the actors
carry on, order's restored
and the audience exhales
in tragic wonder, they will
exeunt to ponder their lives.
This is the price of
hesitation, emptied into
the night to wonder about
these things.

Black Friday

2am and
the chronicaling begins:
nights sweats, impossible
on this coldest night of the year,
in your dream you are hunted
by feral dogs on a darkening
plain, you waken to a room
entombed in cold silence,
steal downstairs to wrap yourself
in the haze of infomercials
of sex and real estate, all
that's left to prey on
in America.

At the malls people camp
out to cash in on sales,
the hype, the hoopla, the
extravaganza--they brave
the cold and snow for the
right to capture the flag
of the vanquished merchants!

Today I did not know
who I was. I woke up
in a stranger's house
and hid under a blanket
watching the sun, drinking
their coffee, reading
their books, waiting for some
semblance of famliar
thought to remind me
of who I might be or how
I got here. I played
their music, Neil Diamond,
Sarah Vaughn, Miles Davis,
and Johnny Cash. It was the
Neil Diamond that got me,
"Solitary Man." I was
sitting in a recliner
reading a book of poems
and drinking their good
coffee when I realized
I was not in a stranger's
home at all, I was simply
turning 52.

Northport

Follow an old narrow road
hugging orchards and the great
bay, hawks circling oak
and pine, where
Michigan slowly dies
in peninsular time,
a lighthouse, forsaken
of course, and the stubborn
finger of rocks pointing
north and disappearing.
This is where the waters
merge, you can teeter out
on scum-slippery stones and
your feet feel the confluence,
the crossing of waves,
diagonal diamonds forever
forming, one foot in Lake
Michigan, one foot in
Grand Traverse Bay!, you
are master of two realms,
closer to home than you known.

C O N S C I O U S N E S S

* * * * * * *

It is snowing.

* * * * * * *

The first snow of the year.
Just this week the last gold and fiery leaves
fell to the ground and we raked them in piles,
like graves in the streets, the year buried
just in time for their removal. And so
our roads clog with brooding mounds
until the city crews come at night
with their swirling lights and scoop away
the leaves and leaves and bequeath
a smear of tree-slime on the asphalt,
like the innards of a pumpkin smashed
on All Hallows morn, the street slick with frost.

* * * * * * *

It is snowing
and the air smells
like old pumpkin
and rotting leaves
and woodsmoke.
An old opossum
eyes you darkly
at the gutter
and shivers.
You are forgetting
so much right now.

* * * * * * *

You cannot leap back
into who you were or
what you once did and you
cannot dash forward
into what you would
most desire or pray
for although we spend
so much of ourselves
doing precisely these.
You are trapped here,
in the snow, in the
awareness of the
snow, and your desire
to leave this snow behind
as well as the memory
of all snowtime.

* * * * * * *

It is snowing.

* * * * * * *

When you were young you played
in the snow for hours, built
forts and tunnels and lived
in the cold domain. You
rode sleds and tobaggans
and traversed snowfields,
climbed snow trees and waged war
with snow balls and icicle
daggers, you poked holes
in the pond and trudged trails
like polar explorers
through the meadows.

* * * * * * *

Now snow is an event,
an abstraction, something
that takes place in-the-world,
out there. It is something
we fear. It is cold. Something
we do not understand.
Like those piles of leaves
in the streets that haunt us
so. We would prefer to
lean on a rake and stare
into a flame and watch
the smoke curl up to the sky,
listen to the leaves crackle
and sizzle in the mist.
At least then we would know
something.

* * * * * * *

It is snowing.

* * * * * * *

CEMENT TRUCK / 1st Draft

Tell me, who doesn't love
to watch these mastodons
spin and swirl their cement
and stone, how their sluice slides
down the chute in slops
and plops like drop biscuit
batter so workers can
spread and rake and smooth it
so it cures like pudding
or slick ice and meanwhile
the barrel rumbles like
some antediluvian beast,
these primordial monsters
invading your yard, your
neighborhood, a sure sign
of progress, where kids
with gaped pie holes can't wait
to scratch their names and press
their hands in prelapsarian
goo?

MAUSOLEUM/First Draft

Jars of gelid fetuses floating
in yellow formaldehyde, flecked
debris, bouyant stars swirling
in glass. Overhead, through the skylight,
the February sun, lifeless on marble.
These samples, this display of ontogeny,
pellucid embryos, ghost eyes staring
out from squid brains, when we
enter the museum we feel their cold
eternal eyes like stars, their banality
pentrates our eighth grade souls.
We know we must return to the bus
and sit behind the distorted glass
and stare out on the dirty snow
the depression of Michigan
with eyes no different than
those preserved in the children
interrupted and preserved here.
No philosophy or science
will save us from the world outside,
we have smelt decay and truth
among the artifacts and relics
and we are ready to return
to our lives.

Battery Park

After the drizzle and
brooding fog cleared, the city

gleamed in the honeyed sun!
The philosopher

in his ragged raincoat
licked his bigass cigar

with relish, the luxury
liner cruised by, trailing

"We Got a Party Goin' On"
roiling in its wake, like

some sweet axiom
of consciousness!

Oh the deep mental
postulations and

precepts that flowed almost
playfully as he walked

among the Hmong
fishermen commandeering

multiple rods cast
in the mighty Hudson!

He scanned the surface for
signs, for trepidations,

for scintillations of
preternatural fishness

but all he spotted was
a world trapped in aesthetics,

women cradling hands,
children dressed like bees

and wizards, barechested
joggers slick with sweat

and the air filled with a
polyglot of dialects,

you cannot square the mental
istic with the carnal

or carnival, the flesh
or the rotting vegetables

in the park or the vacant
eyes of the men selling

trinkets and plantains and
I love NY t-shirts

under the dying sycamores
at the Liberty pier.

This is Battery Park.
You lick your cigar and

smoke and fumigate your
ruminations about

the world in all its
abstractions, things,

What is the real American
idea? and What is truth?

and all the while you think
it's just a matter of

clear articulation,
apprehendible form,

like the city rising
from the fog, you'll find it

if you just keep walking and
thinking, it'll come, sure

enough.

TONIGHT


ten years ago today


Tonight, here, on the edge of the West,
we are sweating in a bistro, drinking
iced cider and doughuts as the leaves
fall down around us in the hot wind.
Lightning glistens off the windows
and surrounds us in dramatic flashes--
it's just so damned big out here,
so open, no place to hide in all this
flatness, this is everything we're
afraid of, and love, the darkness,
all of this October heat, the wind,
all the withered trees rattling husks,
and driving here all day, in the dying
afternoon haze, the highway lined
with skunks and bloated deer and the lovely
smell of decay, and then, in the grove
of birch we saw a rolled car and medics
kneeling in deep grass over a body.
All around us, the world was
turning lavender and rust, bending
to the wind, and in the hills, the cattle
were slowly coming home. The sky wheeled
with hawks, as if what was happening here,
here of all places, mattered, and I thought back
to how ten years ago my father died,
how these things come to matter in ways
we can never really know.

PELIGROSO


written in Minneapolis, October 6


At Ludington we'd been walking
the pier just like always, the sun

fresh and full on our faces, the wind
gusting up the waves in heaving

sprays, and so we ventured into
the deep, dancing between billows

of green, then blue, then oil-slick black.
The swells sucked and swallowed the rocks,

then flooded the air with rain and
mist, cold foam, delicious agony!

We knelt behind the salacious
lighthouse where the wind sullied our

souls and small boats dallied and dipped
indecently. We hid there in

our lee cove and necked til our bones
chilled in the summer sun, ridiculous,

and headed back for avacados
and gouda cheese, back through the

swells and the gusts and the heaving
waves and all the vertiginous

sway when we spotted the skinny lads
in red trunks, all ribs and tanned flesh

running along the pier, several
diving in, and one red rescue boat

bobbing up and down in the green
shallows, banging against the rocks

and the DANGER/PELIGROSO
sign, it happens so fast, someone

strayed too close to the pier or was
pulled out by the rip tide and now

standing on the shore a family
of Mexicans, their black hair pasted

wet on their foreheads, shivering,
staring out at the malevolence

of the world, at the boys diving,
deaf to all of the shouts drowned out

by the wind and waves crashing
at their cold, shriveled feet. It is

so hard to love in this world of
terrors, something we must always

learn, something that seems to wash
over us again and again.

EMIGRE


That apartment on Stanford, just
south of the shotgun shacks in Freetown

and east of the Montrose cruisers,
we lived in a brick duplex above

Mr. Williams and his suspenders
who hid behind the blinds except

on rent day when his soft white flesh
ventured into the sun to collect

his check, 300 bucks got us
a second floor kitchen and front

room connected by a bedroom
and two swinging doors that creaked

and flapped like fake applause.
All day you taught in schools and I

worked with accountants -- we drove
home to shrimp and cerveza, gin

and gyros, curry and claret,
lizards basked on the brick balcony

as we burned our skin, at night
wood roaches flew blindly against

the screen door, bumping in the darkness
like the drunk strangers we'd known

in Pittsburgh. At dawn the roosters
crowed and scratched the grass, and

Mexican boys with cars that spelled
Esmeralda and Rosalita

sped down the street begging chicitas
for rides and the baseball lot filled

with men from trucks and shrunken gloves
and every spare moment I hid

behind my desk with my Underwood
propped up on three Houston phone books

writing words in a strange tongue to
satisfy someone in a distant

city, words that betrayed me, words
that I did not even mean, nor

even know that I did not mean,
I was an emigrant to so

many things then, to love, to
myself, to the world around me.

ECHOLOCATION


How I come
to know you, sending signals

into the emptiness between
the world of matter and dark

matter (which no one really knows)
until I find you & some impulse

returns, both a shiver and a calm,
something I've known all these years, a

universal constant, the pulse of
a quasar, heart beat from the

very beginning, a galactic
tuning fork! Like a dolphin

swimming in the night sea, I chase you
in the heaving, follow your mindstar,

your dance in the wet wilderness.

A CANTICLE FOR BEING


We sat there on the back deck in
the cold sun, bare feet and faces
exposed as the snow melted, we
were reading and thinking about


getting old, I was reading poems
about our bones, our skulls, the stars
and the shimmering sea that waits
us when we die. I was ready


to die, you too, embraced there in
a halo as the melting snow
splashed down into puddles and the
neighbor's wind chimes moaned like a


Tibetan flute and that's when that
bird appeared overhead, so tiny
we could not find him, singing, and
the cool wind off the snow sent shivers


through our flesh and then that unseen
bird broke out in ecstasy, divine
jubilance, absolute rapture,
a celebrant, a symphony


of giddiness, liquid trills and
warbles and whoops and hillbilly
hollers!



I swear as we squinted
at the sky we could feel that sea
shimmering at the edge of
everything! Suddenly, starlight,


the essence, the radiant truth,
the star shake quaking us! And for
a moment we were blind to this
world, it all seemed to melt away


and our eyes transformed into warm
stubborn stones holding on to the
day and the faint heat, this star, this
soul, this ash and bone, the light


penetrating the skull, this eon
stretching itself in all directions,
this bliss of being resting in
the center of our flesh and what


more we can never know for sure.

You are driving
on some splendid
day. There's a faint
chill in the sun,
a hint of winter
still as the maples
explode in green
madness, the fireworks
of tulips and crabs,
how the light pours
through the windshield
and on your hands
as you turn the wheel,
how all of this
is just splendid!,
the glory of those
hymns you sang on
Sundays, her strained
voice and you holding
up the hymnal
like a prayer
as the stained glass
fell on you singing
"O For a Thousand
Tongues to Sing!"

You just want to
tell her of this
moment driving,
this feeling, the sun
on your fingers,
the cool edge of
something vanishing,
something about
all of this, not
straining or trying,
just this joy, this
pang, this sliver,
and when it pierces
you it all wells up,
just for a moment,
the heart swells,
you gasp. It is
the infinite,
the eternal,
the elusive yet
again.