September 13, 2006

The earth, O Lord, is full of your love;
instruct me in your statues.

I rise to the morning (prayers) and to the rain, that is:
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow,
the mysticism of dawn as the Gestalt of night
splinters into the multifarious day, I watch…
the foggy enchantment of faith ebbs.

Through the dark, the garden: a thousand
points of light, rose and marigold, beneath
the dogwood, petunias and impatiens,
lantana around the cherry. Angels I think,
and recall The Secrets of Enoch: I made
the heavens open to him, that he should see
the angels singing the song of victory and
the gloomless light. These are the strands
of dawn to knit as the bats dimple their wings
once finally and tuck themselves away wrapped
inside those wings for the day clinging to the limbs of oak:

instruct me in your statues, who can miss
the grace of it? Superabundance as the rain
falls through the gloomless light and the flowers
in the place of the populators
of the nighttime’s solitudes, the stars, sing the songs of dawn
I know so well.

Still, it’s the sixth day
following the first treatment in
the second course of treatments:
the tiredness knows no lapse: she wakes
to sleep, though different than my own: she thinks
God! … had a day of rest to sit
on the banks of the river to enjoy the pleasure
of his garden of delight. Her wonder, too, is not
my own: can I, that is she, make it the final 11 weeks
with so little rest to rise to and endless work?

Sein und Zeit—Sturm und Drang and the beauty
of the hummingbird six inches from my nose. You are
given enough is the message to Job whose fortunes
were then restored and Lazarus’ sleep to demonstrate
the glory of God…I wonder too.