Vertiginous dawn


O vertiginous dawn
and the silence of things
shattered by song
of a thousand syrinxes.

Moon’s pale flesh absent
the sky. Lifted words of peace
and death and the giving
of life for another: thoughts
turn to soldiers, young men
young women taking aim
needlessly dying ... killing
sons … daughters

O seasons, O chateaus .
O vertiginous dawn:
O those who lay down
their lives for another
the Christ of them.

Each morning comes: symbol of redemption



Saturday: it is morning; it is not yet raining; it will rain;
it is not yet dawn.
Then these words
Glorify the Lord every shower of rain and fall of dew
all winds and fire and heat
then I stepped out into the cat birdsong
Birds of the air, glorify the Lord
praise him and highly exalt him forever.

Ah, gray sacrament of the mundane, and not just the sky
and not just the cat birdsong: Awakening to gratitude
in this generous Eden.
If both sleep and love are little deaths:
Each morning comes: symbol of redemption
Day One after the 7th day…all over again.

March 7, 2007


Dawn comes beneath the wing of the titmouse
(coloring love persimmon)
and with it morning’s words:
He shall come down like rain on the mown field
like showers that water the earth~
And I have read
or dreamt
that indigo buntings in their nests
gaze into the stars and that the stars
gaze back at them.

Out
into the superabundance of dawn’s silence—deep
colors: tiny pink blossoms of spindly peach
trees, succulent Asian roses,
hardly seen, dark, dark translucent blue
sky with stars staring into the eyes
of sleeping buntings and the moon…opaque luminosity,
and in the dark the strange shrill of the
cat bird and the kismet of the black
cat sneaking across the lawn
almost unseen like the ghost of a thief that it is,
overhead the shimmering hunter.

Note: the correspondence, the resonance between
stars and angels, and angels and birds,
a spiritual assonance, a treasure trove
of the mysterium: Give your angels charge
over those who sleep is the prayer of the night,
and we wake to stars and bird song: birds
who taught us to speak; stars that sing
with the voice of angels, and gaze into the eyes
of birds that nest in the clefts of trees.

March 6

Dawn, and along with the mug of Kona coffee, prayers, and bird chatter,
anticipation of the day that will bring me up the Georgia mountains,
the pretty little town.

There I will stop at my office before driving to the home of a man
with advanced AIDS...just beginning a new expirimental protocol of treatments.

The car will smell of rosemary that I clipped yesterday to bring him...a cook...
and others both to dry and to start: dipped in rooting hormone and stuck in Perlite
filling the holes of an old red brick that matches the wall built in 1957.

So, despite the visit to the peach trees with their lovely peachy blooms, the mood
is somewhat somber and already I have heard the call of the black birds.
The river is moving.
The blackbird myst be flying.
And, lastly, our despair at death:
It was evening all afternoon.
. . .
The blackbird sat
In the cedar limbs.

Hopefully, finding someone with whom to have lunch
then I will drive back down the hill 70 miles north of here

and return to the peach trees and pull the rye grass from around their trunks
to expose the white and purple pansies planted in November.

If the day had more flowers and fewer blackbirds....