DafathsDays

2007-07-27T10:49:00.001-07:00

July 27, 2007

…and he strictly charged them that no one should know this. Mark 4: 41b

To renounce the fruits of one’s labors, to live in love with splendid indifference, the high irony of God: To Be, and not to demand, not to control…to allow to be in the full spectrum of possibility beyond plausibility, the blasphemy of pondering theodicy.

To move from small town through small town, from village to village—to be touched, to allow oneself to be touched and the power of one’s self seeps out through a posture of vulnerability.
And the wonder is just where in this bright, blue-faced world he might be safe. There is none, no absolute safety; there is only compassion. The he is everyone and every creature, the ribbon snake.

2007-05-09T04:49:00.000-07:00

Color : May 9, 2007

I began the day reading
an essay on Pink
Floyd, then from Wisdom, Romans,
the Psalms, shall I say of David?
the Gospel of Luke, Merwin:
(very late [early]
I have heard a kind of whispered sighing)
in the course of this a list
(no mark of genius, here) a list
coursed across synapses
of memory: names: Rob, Tom, Bill, Carol:
ordinary names of ordinary people
I know: an offense, cirrhosis, AIDS, breast cancer….
Memory: and just of yesterday

The weight of a day … sighing … even the roses
seem to be weeping, to be withholding
their joyous, transcendent effervescence.

I turn behind me, On Being Blue:
A Philosophical Inquiry, Wm. Gass.
Though brilliant, is too irreverent
to cite the moment : ah,
the velvet bridge the color of ripe gold.
Subdued, ripe, the morning with its sweet faces.

2007-05-06T04:09:00.000-07:00

Home : May 6, 2007

Am trying to write a memoir of the dawn:
the first morning home in a week--
The beach was majestic, the gulf comforting,
but here I sit out to birdsong,
where I stayed, there was none;
here there are flowers,
where I stayed, there were none.
I am quite overwhelmed by what I have done:
wonder...and life...and beauty;
I recognize it as home: it nurtures.

I walk the stone path past the Canadian hemlock
to the small vegetable garden in the woods:
six tomatoes, four peppers, a white blooming
perennial sage, thyme, hot oregano, spiky chives,
three Spanish lavenders with blue fluff balls for heads:
all a mere suggestion of a garden in the woods.

Above this, past the hydrangeas returning
after the burn of the April freeze,
the grapes thrive, the peaches, two pears,
two quinces all planted: thrills with superabundance.
The freckled violet has no bloom.

The magnolia, one lemony bloom;
on the deck out back,
the Meyer's enhanced lemon with nearly ripe,
nearly grapefruit-sized globes of yellow.

I read, sadly, on the beach and in the yard
where I stayed, a sad, lifeless yard where I stayed,
a depressed chaotic space that bore to mind the imperative:
O, blessed rage for order...I prayed....
I read there even a disappointing book,
Jim Harrison, Returning to Earth: in our reveries
on death, must we seriously entertain notions of
bear-reincarnations? Here out with the redolence
of rose, the slightly pumpkin color
of the Stella d'Oro day lilies, pineapple sage,
while in the lambent light past dawn,
while seated at the small teak table, a magnificent
beautiful book, if even sad in that tragic, inevitable, human
way: House of Meetings of Amis: intelligence, order.

The green lawn is not yet fully awake to the spring,
the warmth, the sun, the light, yet it provides
repose to the eyes...the soul...the heart. Happily,
gratefully, we are home: jiggety-jog.

2007-04-27T11:56:00.001-07:00

April 27, 2007

Separating the fragments from the whole:

Thinking about how to care: the grape
vines planted a month ago, when
still there was frost in a world of hearts
of limited compassion. Immersed as I am
in the watery milieu of morning, cold river
against the skin; dawn’s high above
100 y/o oaks birds skim pale blue sky we are
mortal after all, what call is it
that draws my eyes up always? Each morning
from the azure there comes no harm…canon
of surrealist catechism. Hydrangeas burnt
back by those cold and heartless dawns
indifferent to blue, iced, now green-up new
shoots. I bang the uprights two feet
into clay to string the wire branches
will follow purple Concord, red, green remembering
melted paraffin poured all those years ago
on top of jelly made from grapes the wasps
left us.

2007-04-26T05:34:00.001-07:00

April 26, 2007

On the breeze last week came the scent of irises. (The scent … is one of the most complex and elusive, weaving in metallic violets and snow covered roots. It is a melancholy fragrance by its nature.) Now sitting out in the dark morning, the gentle breeze plays bar keep and mixes its aromas, raises the possibilities, metallic, rooty iris with the cinnamon fruity-damask of the Lilian Austin rose in all its labial salmon.

The complex of morning began within this complexity of fragrance and a Marguerite Duras story about an ancient woman from Bugue on the Vezere River. Then having completed the morning’s ablutions and other nurturing chores such as misting the Bonsai and orchids, I felt an upward call. And so with the birds I recited the prayers reading: Mene mene tekel parsin: You have been weighed in the balances and found wanting. It is a verdict worthy of most all.

The weight of things, men with failing livers in hospital beds, others with severe pains in places of dishonor consequent to treatments for deadly diseases, women with Alzheimer’s, deployed soldiers: the demands of saying you are in my prayers, the vertiginous, the muscular, and the precarious walk across the velvet bridge where everyone feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh.

2007-03-14T06:59:00.001-07:00

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.

2007-03-10T04:43:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-03-07T06:10:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-03-06T04:05:00.000-08:00

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....

2007-02-19T11:22:00.000-08:00

February 19, 2007

Tidings: Soul can flame like feathers of a bird.

We have been together long enough to have reminded me a second time (my, how time flies) that it is time to write a note for Tidings, and so I will try. What follows is an architectural endeavor as I think of the flight of birds.

It's Lent (or, nearly), and I've been thinking about this born again stuff. And I have also been thinking about what is to be said on Ash Wednesday, and I've also been thinking about what is to be said on the 1st Sunday of Lent upcoming. There is a relentless demand for words. And so I think of bird song as an alternative, and I think of one of the characters named Bear of a story I am reading by Charles Frazier (of Cold Mountain) Thirteen Moons. Bear believes that the written word kills the spirit of language, its flight. And of all the birds, I think of the thrush, or of many of them that have the most beautiful bird songs because like most all birds they have a syrinx for song, whereas we have a larynx for words; but distinctive to their own species, many of the thrushes have two syrinxes and hence they sing the most beautiful and complex of bird songs. Ah, the morning chorus, how jubilant, how refreshing, and how soon the spring that will have us rise to it, its morning prayer.

And this is what comes to mind: In the beginning was Word, and Word was with God, and Word was God. Somehow I want my words to conform to that Word, to be the eerie song of the dove: I want to speak the truth about the way and the life. I do get a funereal sense, though, as I write of a dying spirit of language as it is put into print, so like a pinned butterfly in an insect collection, an Audubon bird on his canvas. Yet, I know of the demand on the 3rd generation Christians (those who knew a very old person who knew someone who knew one of the apostles as a very old man) to produce a canon of Christian scripture...words, written words, that would delimit the deterioration by word of mouth memory. My, how fabulistic the stories would have become (did in fact become by then)! A canon of words to safeguard the remarkable person of Jesus, Word made flesh, the embodiment of Word, lover of fish and story, and fishers and fish stories.

(And so the not so new insight: we live by and in word. How fragile and conditional is this being! this human being, and Jesus was one of us, these beings, and he died...puff...but his Word was not puffed out, but became a bird with wings.)

We, people--our artists, poets, and saints--represent all things spiritual with wings. And so Jesus bestows upon us his Spirit, and it is something like a dove, and my, what a haunting song is the dove's song. And I think of the feather pillow weight, the smothering weight, of those (flightless birds) who would insist that this Spirit filled Word is just this one thing, and no other. Ah, the polymorphic metaphor: so like the flight of birds--the departures and arrivals--at the bird feeder whose chaotic non-pattern defies logarithmic reduction, yet points to the Strange Attractor originator or word(s).

Here's a few words for you: Abram -- Abraham & Sarai -- Sarah. It's only through the spoken word, not the written, that the aspirated life and significance of these name changes is formulated: God promised to them..., and their very names became inspirited.

I think of James, the epistle, the Straw Epistle Martin Luther called it not overly impressed by its meek moral demands. So also is the tongue a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits.

And so for Lent I now know that I am giving up (that is, I will try) all defamatory and derogatory words, all dirty words, all cynical words (that is, words of death, flightless words), all words that narrow and limit flight, life, and imagination; and I will speak (that is, I will try) only words of renewal and rebirth, words that soar and affirm, life giving words, aspirated words, and the song of the dove for the soul can flame like feathers of the bird.

2007-02-08T03:41:00.000-08:00

February 8, 2007 : The Subjunctive Mood of Things

Every morning more or less
begins the same. I brew
the coffee that I have flown
in; USPS delivers it, but its
flown from Kailuha-Kona
where it’s grown 1500’ above
the Pacific, and roasted, bagged,
vacuum sealed, and mailed…
to me: a box with five
one pound gold bags of Estate, Kona
Blue Sky Coffee, medium roast.

Usually the prior afternoon while
preparing dinner, I fill the brewer
with water and the grinder with beans.
(Sometimes I forget.) At 5AM I brew the coffee
and bring an insulated cup of it to Pat,
and pour my own in a mug with the logo
of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and I sit
and read and brood. I sit: a hung
jury, sequestered, forced by a judge
to reconsider the facts…to ponder
the fates…to weigh again the evidence…
to reassess the testimony.

And you, Lord, through whom we all
have eyes, and who sees souls,
tell us if we all one
day will see your face.
(Antonio Machado)
I will make your overseers peace
and your taskmasters righteousness.
(Isaiah)
Some one is gone.
There is dust on everything in Nevada.

I pour the cream.
(William Stafford)

Visiting the moon is customary to feel
the metaphysical tug of things
toward one another. The white of
young girls crinolines in the late ‘50s,
puffing out their dresses like mini
Victorians. Dark sky lightened by
Celine’s last quarter and high pale
clouds, thin and racing from the west
bring thoughts of menstrual huts
of the Cherokees near Etowah north of here.

Like a botched hanging, there’s still life
in the hung jury, not totally disheartened,
and breath. Irony lightens the mood
as cream is poured into coffee. There is dust
motes everywhere as morning light streams
its rainbows through the sash. The face
of David Lynch, his strange hair, his cinematic
vision, his Hindu profession: a Unified Field,
his implicit connection….The subjunctive mood:
If… descends and settles: Yes.

2007-02-07T04:11:00.000-08:00

February 7, 2007 : Suffer the children

Suffer the little children to come unto me for such is the kingdom of heaven.
And so the day begins with an implosion of innocence.

First, out into the Bony moon of the Cherokee past its ripe prime though still a gibbous pale in the midnight blue predawn, soft as a selenite heart.

Trees shiver not as cruelly as yesterday under the Moon When Trees Pop: It was colder then; that was the Sioux north of here.

To a Vulture
What do you make of death, which you do not cause, which you eat daily?
I make life, which is a prayer, which is clean bones.

Why even before this the eye of the blackbird was envisioned and with it an opening sentence of Emerson, The eye is the first circle, and the second is the circle of wonder that it frames?

I wonder if Iraq is a vultureless land where death has no clean bones and all the rooks are seen departing.

Palaces
of countless rulers
now but dust
Empires rise:
people suffer.
Empires fall:
people suffer.

Suffer the children to come unto me….
Innocence, such a lean commodity, so hard to find clean bones, pure hearts, spirits of the uncontaminated.

We can only dream of the regime of tenderness with the soft selenite heart
knowing God is no Puritan, to live is to soil and be soiled.
Suffer the children to come unto me….

2007-02-06T04:07:00.000-08:00

February 6, 2007

Asleep with a river nymph~~

Up from a night of beautiful dreams and deep sleep

There was a river with beautiful water, and a furrowed riverbed and a woman, a naiad (not a Palma Vecchio version, but lean with long dark hair and a flowing sun dress; [I found her picture on line*]). On my knees I wanted to move through the river, down or across I do not know. She warned me that the water was more treacherous than it looked. There was a passive desire to be dissolved into the river, a dream of non-being. I recognized the river and have dreamed there before or so I dreamed. And so in dream I gain as much as I lose in sleep: the beauty, the ephemeral pure presence, the taste of adventure (salt?) that is constancy. And I wondered after seeing the picture if I dreamed I was a merman.

When I woke I read of salt and of fire.
For everyone will be salted with fire.
…
Have salt in your self and be at peace with one another.

The reverie of fire is an attempt to inscribe human love at the heart of things.

Having ended her confession, she throws the string into the fire, and when the god has consumed it in his pure flame, her sins are forgiven her and she departs in peace. This happens as the men are searching for the cactus that will en-thuse them, enthios: put them in god, a dream of non-being.

The river is dangerous but good and beautiful; there is no surrounding terrain: there is nothing else. The woman is ephemeral and pure, the fire purifying, burning away the excrescences, leaving the salt and peace in the non-being of God.

*my.opera.com/I_ArtMan/albums/showpic.dml?album=4993&picture=50596)

2007-02-05T03:40:00.000-08:00

February 5, 2007 : The fast I choose

Is not this the fast that I choose: Is it not to bring the homeless poor into your home? (Isaiah 58: 7)

And so my thought turns to Billy not heard from for 6 or 7 months. Homeless and maybe (likely) dead, not incarcerated, I checked. Last he called, he was as desperate as he ever was: on the street, seat of pants torn out, police seeking him (or so he claimed; even Billy loved a fish story to fill out his meager life). Billy was brought into many homes, the only one that could reliably hold him without bringing ruin on itself was the Georgia Department of Corrections, that and under a bridge somewhere (where, I suspect, he died). And thoughts turn to the poetry of Milosz away from his Book of Luminous Things (though Billy was a luminous thing, not many knew) and to his poetry of an alcoholic at the gates of heaven:

Not suspecting you had picked me from the Book of Genes
for another experiment altogether.
As if there were not proof enough
that free will is useless against destiny.

And so it must be, that those who suffer will continue to suffer,
praising your name.

His voice is heard only in the psalms of the exiled, alienated, and disenfranchised. His voice is not heard in the Book of Laughter and Forgetting, though he is forgotten by all but a very select few). His name is listed only in the Bible of Sad Things. Billy had a son. One wonders knowing this if this son has quoted from the Book of Genes.

2007-02-04T04:06:00.000-08:00

February 4, 2007 : Metaphysics of Dawn (again)

All mornings are appointed psalms and so too today (93 & 96) and the morning’s psalms both say the earth has been made so firm it cannot be moved, yet Matthew’s enthusiasm is contrarian: If you have faith … and say to this mountain, “Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,” it will be done. The juxtaposition of this dawn: a word that reassures brings to mind a word that shatters the reassurance. Sitting in a chair wondering: can both be true? (Sitting in a chair knowing: the mysticism of the fixidity, a Zen, is surer than the faith of transformation, a physics.) Can the juxtaposition be related to the invisible traces of bird flight, movement without markers, and that’s why there are birds, movement without movement?

Across the east the luminous clay path of dawn: and I stand out, face the dawn, arms outstretched, thumbs skyward, northward and southward, and say to the Light, Rise, rise. And it rises like a mountain spewing forth its hot magma, as the dense unity of night shatters into the multiplicity of day.

Justice is found in the hoped for certainty of the balance of things; mercy is tendered in promise of transformation. Justice is political; mercy interpersonal.

2007-02-03T06:03:00.000-08:00

The Albatross

Tried to write about birds and mountains but the only thing that came to mind were the same old words about wrens’ songs piercing the crisp morning air and mountain top transfigurations with haze and tents, and old bearded and wizened men, and stories about albatrosses nesting off the British coast along with those white birds the gannets that belong there. O well, it’s cold. The mind can only do what it can do and there have been no reports on the status of flamingoes in Florida in the wake of the statewide tornado that befell them yesterday; but they live south of there, mostly, I suppose. And so in the face of disasters such as rogue storms and ruined war policies there is the answer to the question put to Jesus, Some things can only be accomplished with prayer. In truth, this is resonate with Zen koans: Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand? The sound of one hand is the mysticism of silence that is the wind, a brooding over the waters of chaos before there was beginning. Jürgen Moltmann says there is no problem if we are life centered rather than people centered: life will go on despite the sinking of Manhattan Island: What’s good for the nesting and lost albatross maybe what’s good. I remain, with respect to this, agnostic.

2007-02-02T08:48:00.000-08:00

The End

It has been a long several months...since May when the thing was first identified. I guess it matters little that the survival rate is up over 90%; there is still the anxiety associated with the diagnosis; the two surgeries; there is still the scourge of the treatments: 2 courses of chemo followed by 32 radiation burns. (My sister asked if the radiation was contagious, that is, would I glow in the dark from sleeping next to her? I don't.) This morning by 8 it all or nearly all became history, something to be remembered and talked about. The treatment is basically past. There will be Herceptin drips every 3 weeks through August but that is a different thing. And there is still the threat of lympodema developing, but it has not yet and with each passing day the threat wanes. And there is the peripheral neuropathy in the feet that can last years...nerve damage as a side effect of the curative of the poison...drip...drip...drip. But it's over. There remains the gifts of the black Mustang GT to sex up her life a little, the big screen TV, and the IMac computer, and all the little touches, the boys care, etc. But it's over though the left breast is as red as fire engine. But it's over. Tonight we celebrate. The end.

2007-01-25T12:30:00.000-08:00

January 25, 2007 :

The witness and the albic dawn of things equally real….

I remember the turgid green of a sea breaking with force against its eastern shore, Cyprus invisible in the far distance. The color was beautiful and the water dangerous. It came to me with the recitation of these words: The sea is his for he made it…. (Venite) I remember the wind. It all surprised me, knowing the Mediterranean to be non-tidal, and nearly enclosed, and so much smaller than the Atlantic and Pacific, despite the stories, I thought of it as placid.

I think about that sea, the symbolism of it, the turgid green danger of life…is his. It’s a profession of faith, a way of interacting with the world. (Clearly there are other ways.) Not the absence of danger, but the belonging of the danger to the source of it all.

The last verse of a lesson appointed for this morning: And after he had taken leave of them, he went up on the mountain to pray. He would have prayed to the him of the sea, words he would have had memorized the Psalms being his prayer book, though the referenced sea, I presume, was Galilee, a sea also of high dangerous winds sweeping down from Mt. Hermon (Come with me from Lebanon, my bride.... Descend from the crest of Amana, from the top of Senir, the summit of Hermon, from the lions' dens and the mountain haunts of the leopards. You have ravished my heart….) and turgid waters.

The heights of the hills are his for he made them. He went up the mountain to pray, the mountain that was his. It was late; he had crossed the sea twice or at least had moved along the shore twice that day by boat, so the story goes, and was near Bethsaida (location uncertain) on the northeast of the sea. He went up a hill alone to be united with the one he called Father.

I wonder: Was he witness to the albic dawn.

2007-01-25T06:04:00.002-08:00

Thursday, January 25, 2007

January 25, 2007 : Reverie on the Venite

The witness and the albic dawn of things equally real….

I remember the turgid green of a sea breaking with force against its eastern shore, Cyprus invisible in the far distance. The color was beautiful and the water dangerous. It came to me with the recitation of these words: The sea is his for he made it…. (Venite) I remember the wind. It all surprised me, knowing the Mediterranean to be non-tidal, and nearly enclosed, and so much smaller than the Atlantic and Pacific, despite the stories, I thought of it as placid.

I think about that sea, the symbolism of it, the turgid green danger of life…is his. It’s a profession of faith, a way of interacting with the world. (Clearly there are other ways.) Not the absence of danger, but the belonging of the danger to the source of it all.

The last verse of a lesson appointed for this morning: And after he had taken leave of them, he went up on the mountain to pray. He would have prayed to the him of the sea, words he would have had memorized, the Psalms being his prayer book, though the referenced sea, I presume, was Galilee, a sea also of high dangerous winds sweeping down from Mt. Hermon (Come with me from Lebanon, my bride.... Descend from the crest of Amana, from the top of Senir, the summit of Hermon, from the lions' dens and the mountain haunts of the leopards. You have ravished my heart….) and turgid waters.

The heights of the hills are his for he made them. He went up the mountain to pray, the mountain that was his. It was late; he had crossed the sea twice or at least had moved along the shore twice that day in a boat, so the story goes, and was near Bethsaida (location uncertain) on the northeast of the sea. He went up a hill alone to be united with the one he called Father.

I wonder: Was he there as witness to the albic dawn.

2007-01-24T04:50:00.000-08:00

January 24, 2007 : Finding the Lumionous Amongst the Gore

It is a nightmare to begin a day pondering on the head of John the Baptist! a gruesome still life on a platter. What gave rise to such a fiction just outside the caesura of grace? In search of the luminous element. Once, long ago, in a hospital room a man of Greek Orthodox persuasion showed me this head dripping gore tattooed on his left forearm. We were saying prayers for his wife. The detached head was an icon for him of some spiritual power, an identity unretrievable for me, a representation of faith speaking into the face of worldly power.

Contemplation: a reverent and pious approach, the prelude to the poem;
Laughter: the eternal sea will never learn to laugh.

There is in Mark perhaps a little element of humorous derision, an insider’s wink, toward Herod Antipas whose step-daughter would never have been called upon to entertain his guests with the dance of seven veils, and a harkening back to the alluring and painted Jezebel Ahab’s queen, patron of the Astarte, womb of the universe, before whom Elijah stood as the prophets of Baal bloodied themselves and raved on, and who were later slain by the sons of this Elijah enthused with the Spirit of Yahweh: and God was in the still small voice. A contrast in styles.

John the hermit dressed in exomis vis-à-vis an orgy of excess. Who is remembered and honored this day, the king Herod or the hermit whose head the king could have, but whose spirit was still alive in that hospital room?

The sea raves humorless and indifferent, and still we must laugh in the face of the pretense of the powerful.

2007-01-23T03:22:00.000-08:00

January 23, 2007 : The Double Helix of Splendor

It is as if there were this bracketed dispensation of grace, a short period of time anointed with receptive guilelessness, a time of wholeness when word and touch whisked up a double helix of splendor. I wonder what would happen if cynicism died, of course: a pretend. So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them. Then a snake parting the grass by Emily Dickinson: But never met this Fellow / Attended, or alone / Without a tighter breathing / And Zero at the Bone—

Both of these are luminous things. Both are a parting of the grass where a spotted shaft is seen, and then a closing that opens further on. Both a Zero at the Bone though one a more profound Zero than the other, one a dispensation of wonder in sanctified history, the other a marvel in a sanctified backyard.

To address the world as Thou, the ethic of dignity, redeeming the serpent, re-sanctifying touch.

I rise in search of that opening further on, that bracketed dispensation of grace to come, when hands and words form the tender of the realm in which we abide along with the song of the pine warbler in the predawn dark, the dark shimmer of aubade that too tightens the breath.

2007-01-22T11:31:00.000-08:00

January 22, 2007 : Cranial Occlusions

The sun has failed to appear
Today as have words. There’s an Indian,
Red American, not Asian, who believes
The written word to be the death
Of the spirit of language. I was
Reading of him--only way
I would have any knowledge of him--
While sitting in the red chair
In the corner of the orange (sunset)
Room, though much of the house
Is a sect of orange. Above me
A hole, ragged and irregular, has formed
In the ceiling scratched from above
Where nests a gray squirrel that entered
From the shed roof of the added room. Earlier
I climbed a ladder and sprayed
Red fox urine into the nest
Hoping to put the fear of place
Into the soul of the rodent(s)
And for it to repent and leave, implying in a sense,
The food chain: red fox eats gray
Squirrel. I believe
The Indian.

2007-01-21T04:02:00.001-08:00

January 21, 2007 : Morning Miracle

It’s morning.
The wind is rising and the rain is coming.
I read of a dead beetle on a foreign road—
I pictured it dirt—
Originally written of in Polish.
The vision of the sunlight reflecting off
Its hard green-bronze carapace is my own,
Three pairs of legs neatly stowed the poets.

I read of a man who lay by a pool thirty-eight years
Waiting; he was lame. What else was to be done?
I wondered about the number thirty-eight
That neither twelve nor three is a factor of.
It is a factoral prime and it is the number
Of slots on an American roulette wheel. John
Would not have known this. It is eight
More than thirty: a really long time to wait.

I wondered about his atrophied muscles
If suddenly some one said to him, Rise,
Take up your pallet and walk. It was the Sabbath,
A day of rest. The beetle could do it.
The man could not. Already in the outside,
Even in the dark, the pine warbler sings
In a world full of birds and miracle.

2007-01-20T05:57:00.001-08:00

Revisionism and Creation : the Origin of the Super Bowl

We rise to the Sabbath, the day the Lord we are told drew back from his work and rested. This much is true. Now for the rest of the story:

Having plucked two or three ripe avocados and having made a sumptuous guacamole, and having chopped a couple tomatillas with cilantro and notched up a bit with a little Serrano, God sat back with a bowl of chips, the dip, and the salsa verde, put his feet up on bole of an oak made for this purpose, and intended to watch the Super Bowl 4000BCE. Imagine the divine disappointment in finding the Super Bowl had not yet been invented. In all his divine omniscience God just had not given this detail any thought: imagine, a day of rest and no football! Making a note of this God decided to create a Pete Rozelle DNA and toss it into the gene pool on the morrow. Since a thousand years is like a day to God it would not matter much if this gene formed in the womb about the time of Abraham and Sarah, a thousand years later when bushes burned and were not consumed (think of the advertising windfall this would have inspired), or within fifteen minutes or so coincident to the creation of the Mustang. Needless to say, world history (and the fate of Detroit and therefore the careers of Eminem…the Supremes…Smokey Robinson) may have been a bit altered had this gene come to term during the reign of Decius what with the ascendancy of the Lions and their favorite arena toy the Christians. (Well, it didn’t; ‘nough said, no need in speculating about divine providence, kismet, or whether Joan d’Arc would have driven the Brits from Orleans on Friday May 8, 1429.)

God satisfied divine intention, but by the time Rozelle’s era did finally (in human currency) arrive, Saturday had become Sunday and Nikola Tesla had discovered AC allowing for football as well on Monday in lighted arenas and domes and things (thank goodness, that is to say, Providentially, Dandy Don Meredith was willing to lay aside bass fishing for a few seasons), and hence we have both Super Bowl Sunday (after Mass, which is before breakfast) with Monday Night Football thrown in.

After the game God could be heard saying, That salsa is good, in fact it is very good; it is simply divine.

2007-01-19T05:27:00.000-08:00

January 19, 2007 : Stillness: Surrounding, Sustaining, Strenghtening

…Into your hands I commend my spirit
(for you have redeemed me,
O Lord, O God of truth).

A foreshadowing of Passion Sunday as today Psalm 31 is appointed, and (in part) is recited by Christ from the cross as his last words according to this year’s Passion narrative, Luke.

A gracious death portrayed, and not that alone, to die as one had lived…in the hands of God, apparently without reservation. This is portrayed by Mark differently (in today’s Gospel): Jesus asleep in the stern on the storm-riddled sea, Peace, be still.

In July of 2001 the Quakers held a conference in the mountains of Virginia the theme of which was:

Stillness: Surrounding, Sustaining, Strengthening

Here Stillness was defined in the words of Thomas Kelly, that objective, dynamic Presence which enfolds us all, nourishes our souls, speaks glad unutterable comfort within us, and quickens in us depths that had before been slumbering. Somehow in the boat on the storm-riddled sea as well as on the cross Jesus had this stillness until death, was embraced by the objective, dynamic Presence.

2007-01-18T04:23:00.000-08:00

January 18, 2006 : Thursday : The Hinduish prayer

…In you we live and move and have our being. The collect for Thursday, the Hinduish prayer, inside and outside the mouth of god; living in the river of God challenged by the spiritual assertion of deutero-Isaiah: there is nothing outside of the moral provenance of God along with the insistence, the absolute insistence, that overarching the universe and under girding it, justice and mercy, despite all appearances (an assertion the author of Night disputes whose soul as a child witnessed the death of God. All is grace, responds Mauriac. If the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word for each one of us belongs to Him—the immutable, ever running river).

The tail wagging the dog (the Bible is not without its ethnocentrisms), or early experiments in chaos theory, that behind it all, the Strange Attractor…. This is a story of Marco Polo telling the Great Kahn of the Invisible Cities and the name of the city is Ersilia, a city of webs of intricate relationship seeking a form. (This, of course, is also the morning.)

And I have read from A Book of Luminous Things of a dragonfly, carnation, and of a butterfly as the cold near-ice rain falls sounding gutturals in the gullet of the downspout, a toll: all things with wings, all beautiful and delicate; all perishable things.

While reading about aboriginal forms of birds painted on a ceiling obsessively by a man who suddenly ignored all other responsibility and about whom it came to be known was suffering from Parkinson’s or some form of dementia, it came to me that before he died, Kingsley Amis had typed over and over again on a piece of writing paper while sitting before a window, seagull: the mystery of wings and spiritual entities, all things spiritual are represented with wings, all departures are flights. The dove of Pentecost, the dove and raven of Noahan lore, the Raven of the Koyukon people by whom the world was formed: Ponder the ravens for they neither sow nor reap.

All is grace: we are simply not the product of our own doing: we came to be in the womb of another. Though all conceptions are not immaculate, there is more than one immaculate conception.

2007-01-17T07:42:00.000-08:00

January 17, 2007 : a dream-compelled narration

5:20AM: already overcome by a welter of words (and I have spoken none): a penitential psalm of great antiquity, words of Isaiah from the time of Cyrus the Great (6th century BCE), a lesson from Ephesians that could not have been written before 80 or 90 of this era (deutero-Pauline), the Gospel of Mark from about 70CE, several collects; a poem of a Polish poet born 10 years after me, and one of an American living in Hawaii born 25 years before me. Read the plot summaries of both the film The Incredible Shrinking Man and the novel it was based upon, and a phrase of Martin Amis, “(his) soul had been doing the work of decrease” (self-referencing comments). And there are still the images of that strange detritus of the night, dreams … that are, I suppose, the detritus of the previous day(s). Is there an eye (I) to this storm?
The psalm (38) spoke not a word to me; it felt a little like self-loathing…self-indulgent.
Am fairly amazed by this Isaiah who claims Cyrus is a servant of the Hebrew God doing this god’s calling though he, Cyrus, does not know this God. It is a remarkably open and embracing posture from such a provincial setting: reading world history from my backyard.
How modern, meaning normal, this church in Ephesus seems with all its little petty disputes and conflicts; how really sweet is the message: be tender to one another.
You wonder reading Mark why someone(s) allowed this sermonette to be attached to the parable; it too is a work of decrease.

But it’s water, peaches, and the sun that remain etched in my brain, the poetic images and the little orchard we planted this fall, an Asian pear, a Fuji apple, and two Georgia peaches.
Does the setting sun recite its own poetry … believe in its resurrection?
The rain from two days ago will move from the iridescent clay, up through the roots of the peaches and become the nectar that dribbles down our chins back into the clay as we bite into one of those peaches (two years from now) ripened by sun that will have resurrected numerous times despite its indifference: the irony of divine love, or the divine irony of love.

2007-01-16T04:18:00.000-08:00

January 16, 2007 : Mark 3: 19b & ff

Will be a day of sun
Locked out behind iron
Curtain and rain. Rising to ruin
Dream land, though key to pick up
Wonders of new day: there once was a woman
With the phthisical mate
Who used his still body to incubate
Hen eggs before he died…and cooled;
Then: of those who tried to seize Him
And those thinking Him
A money bank try to enshrine Him
For profit, set up shop: they would come
And pay to pray to; one hates to think
Of greed amongst the Holy
Family; Mark did: before there was belief
There was cool detachment, willingness
Toward pragmatic exploitation
Of prayer and magical power. Just lay your hands
On the TV set: feel the healing
Power …. send the check: better the woman
With the phthisical mate
Who used his body to incubate….

2007-01-11T03:11:00.000-08:00

January 11, 2007

The day began with a reading of a resurrection appearance from the 6th chapter of John…Jesus walking by night in the storm to the boat: He crosses the sea to be with those who follow him: the power of allegory. How the Gospel written “from above” though as allegory becomes “from below” so accessible, so meaningful, and moving, so hard-and-fast real. Jesus, then, in these post resurrection times (that is, the same dispensation as the disciples in the boat) is not our friend who is with us as an unmistakable companion, but rather one who is a vague but sure presence who appears to us as an embodied intuition… to me in the dark silence of the pre-dawns, to all of us, despite Nietzsche, when 2 or 3 are gathered in his name.
My faith
is a great weight
hung on a small wire
as does a spider
hang her baby on a thin web.
…just a thin vein with blood pushing back and forth in it
and some love.
(Anne Sexton)

2007-01-04T06:47:00.000-08:00

January 4, 2007 Ponder the Raven

I wonder if there was ever a moment when a cardinal sitting outside my window sat there in blazing splendor signifying nothing.

We benefit greatly from rabbinic commentary on all aspects of Hebrew Scripture and so too on the Burning Bush of Exodus though I do not believe any scholar has suggested that the Bush was in fact a cardinal sitting in blazing splendor. Rabbenau Bechaya suggests though that the Bush is a paradigm for all physical reality that being a spiritual creation of God is overwhelmed by a spiritual flow emanating from God, and that the Bush is not consumed is a sign of God’s providential sustaining of the universe: we are not alone.

It has also been stated that the Bush is a sign of humility, that God is present in the most trivial of things…a bush. And it has been stated that this was an early undeveloped exposure of Moses to God, later he could hear God directly absent the need of a visual structure unlike all other prophets of the Old Testament.

A theodicy, we are taught. Different from an epiphany, which is an insight, an idea made manifest; a theodicy is an experience of a god’s self-disclosure, that is it is a sacrament, a mediated experience of God. In the burning bush that was not consumed Moses experiences Yahweh’s total and infinite compassion, the God who remembers the people’s suffering and inspires the will of leaders to act on God’s behalf with the transforming power of God that saves without consuming: the Eucharistic wafer is eaten and there is no less the body of Christ, but the more of it in the world.

I sit before the window. The fires burn blue. Why this year for the first time do the blue birds come to the feeders in half dozens? The cardinal blazes in divine splendor, the blue bird simmers the sustaining and sanctifying truth of the divine superabundance available to eyes, ears, hands, and mouths of the blind, the deaf, the feeble, and the hungry. Ponder the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap....

2007-01-03T05:50:00.000-08:00

A Tale of Two Visions

Pat Robertson was visited by God
and this self-proclaimed prophet
foretells of a reign of chaos and destruction
and christens the politics of fear
as the new gospel: Fear conquers love.
How different his dream than Jacob's, for instance,
at the spot he came to call Bethel,
where a ziggurat reached to heaven
atop of which danced those messengers of God
in divine beatitude
commercing with the creatures of earth
and above them Yahweh, presiding;
here the exiled Jacob at war with brother and uncle
is promised a home ... a reprieve from terror ...
the old way of fear is transcended by the new
the way of promise, hope, prosperity, future,
and that which is the most solid symbol
of eternal life: children.
Again, the assertion, I am with you...
we are not alone (in this): the Christmas name
Emmanuel.

2007-01-02T05:05:00.000-08:00

January 2, 2007

Lech lecha: experiencing the world as home, the birth of the ecological principle.

Much has been said about these ancient obscure words (appointed for this morning’s prayer) that have no direct parallel in English, the words that form the matrix of ethical monotheism. I believe it is Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s last literary character, who says in profound nonchalance, As everyone knows, we are alone. Bellow is a respectful non believer, non practicing Jew, a scion of Abraham but not a follower, though like Abraham an intellectual whose intellect challenges the received orthodoxy: Abraham’s assertion: beyond the sun and the moon there is one organizing personal force of Grace, a universal brainstem integrating the two lobes of the brain, more like a person than a blind force, but as a force, more like the tug of gravity that is the physics of love…the Strange Attractor of Chaos Theory.

That aspirant, the breath of life, that wind of creation, that Spirit of Pentecost, is added to his name signifying the spiritual element of God has entered him; that Ravelstein is wrong, we are not alone and we belong to this earth; it is our home wherever we are from, wherever we roam, even as we experience ourselves as alien, disaffected, living in estrangement.

The words function like the Christian cross, a call of renunciation and in that a promise of hope: to have a future of Grace the perceived absolutes of the present must be denied, the gamble must be waged.

2006-12-28T12:34:00.000-08:00

December 28, 2006 --- HOLY INNOCENTS

We celebrate today the slaughter of innocents, a Christmas story, aware that the promise is that these innocents are held in the womb of God and suckled in eternity with a divine milk. It is a day of Isaian tenderness and will effect a meditation on cozy spaces…a nest, an egg: (Noah’s rain was 40 days, the period of time we are taught by Rashi that it takes from conception to the formation of a fetus).
So I put down the book of birds (The Bedside Book of Birds) and pick up one describing a search for 6 lost forebears (The Lost), lost to the Nazis, 6 lives of Bolechow (amongst the 6 million), a generation ago in an historical slaughter of innocents. Bolechow was violated; it should have been a nest, rather it was an instance of annihilation: the creation of nothing out of something: that which was became not the wonder of that which might not be, but the anti-reality of that which is no longer…needlessly.
Then the outlandish, tragic correspondence: Those were boxes, too. Those, too, were arks! (like those of Noah … Moses, boxes of salvation caused to float atop the waters of destruction). This a description of the gashouses of Belzec to which the Jews of Bolechow were brought in other boxes, the stifling cattle cars absent air and filled with the foul stench of human offal where urine might be the only slake for thirst. And so the cozy of nests is demythologized and the story of Holy Innocents moves beyond saga to fact. And what of the promise? What becomes of the meditation? At least one of these stories relies upon the homing of birds, the dovecote, the return of the olive leaf, but this is folk tale.

2006-12-12T11:59:00.000-08:00

The influx of Z & A, N & M, A & P, and J & K onto Kailua-Kona stretched out over 3 days beginning Friday November 17 and ending Sunday the 19th. (The Ks’ arrival from Japan extended later into the week.) Upon disembarking everyone was affected in some way by the long flights: by the bad air in the airliners’ cabins, by jet lag, by bugs we may have brought along internally like Captain Cook and his tars so long ago and then so tragically. Though we were never confused with being returning gods, the ominous start had no bearing upon the quality of the stay, and our fortunes fared far better than those of Cook and his seafarers for we all survived to revisit our continental domiciles.

Consistent with the protocols of romance and travel narrative (exaggeration) the trip has been entitled by some who were there The Perfect Vacation. The captain of the Bite Me II in accord with the convention of all good fish stories could have named it You Should Have Been Here Yesterday: then there were marlin. (We did experience giant manta rays to snorkel and dive with.) Yet the beauty of each day surpassed the one before until, that is, we got to Sunday November 26, a morning that began, as a prelude of sorrow, with a tear: we all had to prepare to depart for our homes.

However it would be a minimalist faux pas to state the days were beautiful and leave it at that. It is true that they were beautiful, the days, meaning: the climate; the water; the sunsets of persimmon and mango; the stark, primordial time-defying charm of Kilauea Caldera; the rain forest filled with the birdsong; the waves breaking over the basalt shore; the thousands of multi-colored fish feeding in the coral bays; the seamless skies; the grandeur of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea each like a Sinai in divine occluded mystery poised to disclose some absolute moral truth blown inland by the Trade Winds off the far shore; the green turtles; the sea horses; the sight of Maui from the Mona Kea Golf Resort; the wild donkeys in the lava; the spinning dolphin like a Sufi at rest alongside the sea kayak; the bottle nose dolphins frolicking in the wake of the Bite Me II; the food and spectacle of the luau. But the world is chock-full of gorgeous landscapes and it is, after all, the Caribbean that lays claim to the most beautiful sunsets. There was present another sect of beauty … two other sects. There was the sheer physical beauty and feminine mystique of our women most especially the bride, but all the women: mothers, aunts, friends, instilling in some that primal urge to caress that which is round … to cherish; there was along with this the more Apollonian beauty of the men, the sculpted, towering beauty of the groom, but all the men variously lean, variously honed, variously aged. But most, there was the beauty of the event, the magnificent Gestalt of it, The Week. There was simply no thing or moment that was not uplifting from the arrivals at the award winning Kona International Airport, to the women from 2 continents gathered in the kitchen on Thanksgiving preparing an Italian dinner (to nurture), through the dénouement of the wedding itself in that most beautiful setting of Christ Church Episcopal 1500 feet above the Pacific. It was a perfect vacation to which we would all like to return … tomorrow and anon.

2006-12-10T04:42:00.000-08:00

DAWN

December 10, 2006

In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us….

Never have I been so struck by these words … recited how many hundreds of times … the overarching structure of love, the regime of tenderness, infused into the beginning of things, the mythic beginning that has no historical starting point except this very instant … every instant can be heard the one ravishing note.

It has been said less well: I thought / that pain meant / I was not loved. / It meant I loved, the departures that begin at birth. Well, maybe. That’s the pain of loss, not annihilation, not a life of failure, of scabies and poverty absent the romantic felicity that conflates poverty with simplicity, in the assertion of the greatest poverty: to not be for the dawn from on high in tender compassion …. On earth, as it is in heaven, if only.

I recite the words in a room at dawn the color of an Hawaiian sunset, an enormous privilege, protected from the winter (When the house is sure, how good is the storm! in the phenomenology of the nest … the hut … all intimate space.) But the assertion from privilege that all space was to be so intimate and with it then the accompanying ethic: Wisdom is known by her children.

2006-11-28T09:50:00.000-08:00

When I think about how beautiful and perfect it was,
tears well in my eyes.
REJOICE:

It was 10 days to an island Adam & Eve have yet to be cast from,
a little paradise in the Pacific.
The earthquake was not felt by us though it broke some glass at the neighbor's.
The trip to the volcano alters one's sense of time.
The Japanese women could only say over and over again, So happy! So happy!
And so were we all.

The gown, despite the scale of the event...so small...was the most beautiful I have ever seen. The bride a gorgeous petite. The groom, the son, a magnificence.
Waves broke over the basalt coast as we drank wine and danced and danced following the food that was as perfect as the bride...the groom.

The service at the tiny Episcopal church down the road unhindered by the politics of fear that makes the gaining of visas so terribly difficult.

We snorkled with the giant manta rays; fished for blue marlin as bottlenose porpoise delighted in the wake. We swam with thousands of fish in the coral reefs.
It was all in all and in every detail a thing of great dignity, a profound expression of love and commitment, and it was ours.

2006-10-03T04:56:00.000-07:00

The sea is His for He made it….

And so the day begins in turmoil and a weary sadness with the recitation that the sea in all her power, storm, unpredictability … all her turmoil … is his. Not the sea in its vast, hypnotic rhythmical beauty, not the romantic sea of Rimbaud that along with the sun forms that shimmering eternity, not the sea of the Caribbean sunsets, but the sea as the metaphor of all that is destructive, threatening; of all that pulls like the outgoing tide on the spirit of the human; of all the on rushing waves that thrash the shore and erode the beachheads of safety and life, dignity and integrity.

The sea along with her internal correspondent the circulatory system -- heart, blood, veins and arteries, the pulses and arrhythmias – God damn it! I say.

In any regard, or maybe obviously, the poverty gains a hold, a poverty that we seemed to be sneaking away from despite even the constant demands of the treatments. But all of this the psalmist says is his: God is the river (or the sea) we float in … or drown in ala Virginia Woolfe. As everyone knows, we are alone (Ravelstien): the psalmist’s near whisper, the purling assertion,we are not alone … though maybe no one is certain. Despite the orthodox expression of the denial of Patripassianism, the turmoil and weary sadness has been brought into the heart of God vis-à-vis Incarnation.

2006-09-30T06:22:00.000-07:00

September 30, 2006

Morning began in the red armchair with the prophet Hosea and the northern chickadee on the table to my left carved by a deceased fisherman and cousin, and thoughts skip from the prophet who married a whore to Cape Cod where red tides close down shell fishing. And so the world is one, and now in the dark out into it having donned my favorite moth eaten lamb’s wool 3 button sweater that I garden in, in cool weather.

The green lawn speaks continuity and respite, even in the dark; it has a kinetic symbolic energy found latent in all nouns. It brings peace to my soul and pleasure. The symbolic gives rise to thought, and the green lawn’s implication is the surplus of being.

Yesterday: treatment 4 in the 2nd 12 week cycle of treatments included again a dose of subcutaneously injected Procrit because the red blood cell count was 10.8, up from one week ago, but still too low. Already she has donned her hair and is out the door to violate the Sabbath rest and give aid to those who suffer at Emory hospital. There is too much too little. (Don’t weep for me, Dulcinea….) It lays on me like a black pall of the olden days.

2006-09-28T05:47:00.000-07:00

September 28, 2006

It’s hard to watch
the deterioration … on the other hand,
there is the shear
heroism
of it as the poisons take their toll
puckering skin and,
now in new ways: the bloody nose,
the tiredness, the constant runny nose.

a monstering horror swallows this unworld
and this is not the story
of history nor, for that matter, salvation …
by flood, fire or blood.

Hold fast to those things that shall endure
writes the psalmist. And so
what are those things? Shall we return
to the devout / or the misanthropic to come to know them?:
As for me, / I’d rather be a worm
in a wild apple than a son of man! The worm
has no love, but only the taste for acidic-sweet
and the rot of the compost. Like the worm in the pile
I’ve read through the Misanthropic Moods
and find no glory in them, misanthropy has
a troubling ease of self-fullness. It is not
the things that last that one has an insatiable
taste for, but the fiery things that turn
to dust, that Lot’s wife craved for, skin
and the firmness of bone in the cleft beneath
the chin, the softness of the flesh in the
concavity of the underside of the shoulder,
things touched and remembered, the aroma
of the May rose. Good-bye is the Amen
that turns life to knee-felt prayer. The Why
is locked into the doodles of imperfection
and arrhythmias of the primordial genome project at its source:
we live despite the war and pain, and find
angels and laughter
squat in every quarter. But thank you for these
creatures that give up their substance to heal
the humans that do love despite it all.

2006-09-25T06:10:00.000-07:00

September 25, 2006

Read The Lost Son this morning, Theodore Roethke. The mysticism of it enchanted me though I did not understand one word…except: A lively understandable spirit / Once entertained you. / It will come again. / Be still. / Wait. Then I went out to snip the roses, pinch off the black spotted leaves, deadhead the marigolds. In the cool morning, the secondary rain running off the cherry limbs felt like ice down the back of the spine…so I wait for the goose-skin thrill of the enchanting presence heralded by the wren call. (I have found it again! / What? Eternity. / In the whirling light / Of the sun in the sea.)

The lawn has become a nearly perfected patch of repose with the rain and the sun throughout the summer, a joyful rest that brings a slight up-turn to my lips and wrinkles the eyes in a Zen of quiescence I created (Give me enough time in this place / And I will surely make a beautiful thing). Beneath the dogwood the blue hydrangea reblooms surrounded by a sea of pink and fuscia impatiens dripping from yesterday’s rain, clashing with the orange of the house.

That’s my morning start. I go back and read what I wrote the 13th of the month, and realize my idiotic redundancy…of the yard, the season, my tunneled perception, the narrowness of my life, its poverty. The pineapple sage with its magnificent red wings has just begun to soar 4’ above its annual cousins the salvia so enticing as it is to the rubies that buzz my head.

2006-09-13T05:53:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-08-23T04:58:00.000-07:00

August 23, 2006

Cats in the Gobi~~

There was the time
I hitchhiked across the Gobi
Desert of Inner and Outer Mongolia back
in the day when Fr. Teilhard
was residing in the Jesuit house
in Peking and spending afternoons
sipping tea with the sculptress Lucille Swan
in her garden alcove in the city.
This was before the discovery of dinosaur
eggs in China and the Badlands
of Patagonia, but long after
the great Emperor Qin buried
the terra-cotta warriors.

There were no cars in the Gobi
and very few people. Hitchhiking
was a very slow and lonely task.
I spent two days in one spot with my thumb
bent backwards and outstretched…waiting
in the desert cold.
There were camel trains formed
of the nearly wild Bactrians with their
humps of fat. That’s when I got my first camel
ride from a nomad from Karakorum trading
in Chinese silk. There are few or maybe no
lions in the Gobi, but the most beautiful
cat of all, the snow leopard of the Himalayas
with its magnificent tail, visits often.

2006-08-18T03:10:00.000-07:00

August 18, 2006

When I woke
I began to remember an accident
from the night before.
As I began to be appalled by the details
I realized I was remembering a dream.
Then I redozed and dreamt I was elected
president and had a fight with my mother
who was interfering with a conversation.
Then I dreamt a lost status had been restored
and I was embraced.
Each tableau brought its own affirmation. Why?
Why are these side trips into the genre
of the absurd reassuring, so affirming,
even in the unpleasantness of their conjectured circumstances?
Is it the satisfaction that accompanies creation:
It was good? … something is better than nothing,
absolutely, that which is where nothing
might be? Just the joy of the whimsy
of the journey? A more or less benign
god-like idolatry: standing in awe before
that which one has made, the repose
of the 7th day, hands on hips, smugly smiling?
Maybe it’s relationship, the satisfaction
arising from the inherent connections
the dreams afford or that are implicit
in their content.

* * *

Friday, later this morning
we will sit for 3 hours as P
receives the final treatment in the first
cycle of 12 week treatments, the last
of the big ones…drip, drip, drip.
This will be a mile marker and good
to have behind us though there are
the accompanying
anxieties of the inevitable effects of next week
as well as those of the unknown,
the 2nd 12 week cycle of treatments,
one per week—drip—for 12 weeks,
and what will be the inevitable effects of these?
And I will be in NJ for the 1st of these
rather than there. Of course, even this
absence is a positive sign for it
would not have been imagined for
the first cycle. Later she will sit erect
in a reclining chair, her right arm
attached to a dangling bag, first
saline, then red, then clear,
then clear, then saline. I will sit
in a straight-back chair more
or less in front of her. She will have
taken a pill orally before hand to counteract—
along with the red drip—the side effects.
It will become tedious, and we will
be surrounded by a few very sick people.
The staff will be pleasant and effectual.
The physician will be interested and reassuring.
When its over we will go own our separate ways:
her back to work next door, me
to have the Pony checked
out to determine why the engine light came on.
Then it will become another 90 degree day in Georgia,
the routine of the ordinary suffused with the extraordinary
in the sacramentality of medical science.

2006-08-17T07:48:00.000-07:00

August 17, 2006

It’s morning here. It’s overcast.
It is a YMCA steam room in 1962…
Garfield, New Jersey
after the demise of the DeSoto
and after the end of the Studebaker (as we knew it)
one of which has sat parked on the same flat
tires for 20 years in my uncle’s backyard,
raising the question of the baby or the Botticelli.
I am going for a run now while practicing
my new Zen while running…
the counting of Mustangs. Most
would know me as moderately liberal, but to some extent
I am retrograde; and so, on the run,
an insight: Black is Beautiful. This is an expression
not so true of the DeSoto which demands
to be clad in red and chrome nor of the Studebaker
which must be true to its name: Golden Hawk,
but it is most true of the groomed
Pony: black,
deep, shiny and beautiful. And so there was
an easterly breeze on the run, refreshing, salvific,
and inspiring. In the metaphor of the ancients
and the language of the Renaissance,
the wind listeth where it will and into my mind
blew the a line of Milosz, skeptical though pious,
to the angels
we are a singular event and not a number
submitted to universal law. And with this
blew in the corresponding expression of Houllebecq,
cynical, intoxicated, and impious:
with the exception of a few geniuses (Botticelli,
I presume?) humanity is a mass akin to a school
of fish, a flock of birds…spiritless. Morally
equivalent statements though differing in attitude, ala
the Gospel of John from above … the Gospel of Mark
from below. In the instances of the gospels,
both uplifting despite their differing
anthropological perspectives, however,
in the instance of the Lithuanian poet
vis-à-vis the French novelist, one uplifting,
the other demeaning; one hopeful, the other a debaucher
full of cigarettes, slime, the Thai sex industry and
Irish whiskey. Would the world be better
if we tossed the baby, saved the Botticelli vis-à-vis
William Gass, and incarnated a couple of Joyce Carol Oates’
and Jim Harrison’s eccentric geniuses? Ah,
but then what of art? The Pony’s
parked outside in Buckhead in an unguarded lot
black, beautiful and undusted this morning
after yesterday’s rain. Counted on the run
one white Saleen, hot and throaty, one red coupe, one
red convertible damaged in the grill, one very
beautiful, like a speeding,
shimmering shadow, nearly the Zen
of the unseen, and one dull green.

2006-08-16T05:32:00.000-07:00

August 16, 2006

Imagine

living in a world in which

in the sky

the sun means love.

This is this heresy to which I rise

as if startled out of the dream-riddled

delusion of lesser things though

even here the rain

falls on the just and unjust

alike, and the First-day people

of wonder…enchantment, first things

unspoilt by the contamination of fall

now upon us … the blindness of age.

Close my eyes

to crawl back in to my sand crab

cave, hovel of imagination

where I am a convert

of the dew, an acolyte of morning

sun glistening in the needled lawn

(on sun days),

bats no longer darning sock-holes

of the sky. Morning star spread

like a mist across the dawn,

the light, pale metaphysic of belief.

2006-08-10T13:45:00.000-07:00

After I awoke this morning,

I went outside into the dark near the garden where the roses grow

and the rosemary...white, yellow, pink, red, and scent of roses and sage filled in the space

beneath the dogwood tree.

In the sky there was a dull white round light. Some say, That's only the moon!

But I say it is the grand tug boat of the night

tugging at the seven seas, the great bays, the tidal rivers, and even

the various sands and loeses of the deserts of the earth. Only the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean

are not responsive to this tug. Who knows why?

And the stars that are night birds that sing the hymnody of the moon

in golden and red whispers

sang, Come to me; come to me.

This is a love story.

2006-08-10T13:38:00.000-07:00

When the lion woke,

he woke to the eye of the lion master

known to some as Morning Star

and in other seasons as Evening Star;

the ancients called the light Venus,

the goddess of love ...

the goddess of strife.

And there are those who associate it with Lucifer,

the red dragon of dark light. This is wrong

for only the lion, and not just any lion

but Alpha lion, the king, knows his master

who roves the morning sky and in some seasons the evening sky.

Its glow is formed by the embers of one thousand and one souls

of the wildebeests

ascended from the tropical grasslands of Botswana.

It is an omen of bounty

and protector of early risers

as well as those who frolick late into the night.

This is another love story.

2006-07-27T07:52:00.000-07:00

Before dawn each day

I rise

ground the beans,

brew the coffee

that I bring to Pat each day

in her favorite Starbuck’s mug

from Kyoto, Japan given to her

by Aiko K...so of Nara

who will become in November

in Christ Church Kealakekua, Hawaii,

Aiko K...o D...iou, a lovely addition

to our tribe. Each Tuesady, Thursday,

and Sunday in this season

with the aged and blind basset at my side,

I water the flowers

that proffer such superabundance

of disinterested beauty;

I tend the birds virtually every day

whose arrivals

and departures grant such pleasure,

who know why?

I say the prayers and read

the poets. Often I run with my mind filled

with these images from Scripture

and the poems, the colors and the flights.

Most every day I write

something like this. Not important, not particularly

artistic, but a nexus between bird

and flower, metaphor, and Joshua’s trombones,

or Peter’s denial and often dream images

carried over from the night. All of this

I think of this as the discipline

of prayer and doxologies of morning. With the cadence

of the run, it forms a rhythm of its own

and takes on a complex linearity.

Tomorrow

I will sit with Pat

for 3 hours as she is injected through a port

with the poisons so necessary, ironically,

to sustain her life. She’s nearly bald now;

it is very hard; it saddens her, so it saddens me.

She will feel crappy for 5 days,

but miss no work.

Last night my 86 year old mother

had surgery to repair the hip broken

when a grandfather clock fell on her

on Tuesday in her home.

In the ICU of the same New Jersey hospital

my 88 year old uncle who lives with her

is recovering from Monday’s surgery

meant to repair

a blocked bowel. Next week I will drive

there, not sure how much time

I will need to spend. I will stop in

Annapolis to visit my niece, her husband,

and their 2 boys.

2006-07-24T09:20:00.000-07:00

July 25, 2006

Secretary of dawns~~

I rise

to the flowers of morning

where coral bells secret

sweet

temptations

in butterfly domiciles

and double pink

impatiens

lure the transparent

winged damselfly

I am the secretary of dawns

in the heartland of sorrows

2006-07-24T04:20:00.000-07:00

July 24, 2006

Sugar~~

Morning:

out with the petunias and poets past

the flight of bats

sadly

already

pre dawn clouds

dissipated

the early flowers of spring past

more showy

than those of mid summer

surpassed

though each day greets the exuberance

of yellow

lily and pursed butterfly

wings of white

rose: a leak of glory

into the summer’s pool

with morning came

a vision of a naked

woman split

disclosed by shed

hair

ambivalence in the hierarchy of beauty

intrigue of spoilt

innocence like

the tongue of an ant

so susceptible to sugar or bacon

fat, but joy…pleasure

is what we are made for

hardened I look

on the tumors

of the oak outside ready

to fall

2006-07-23T05:28:00.000-07:00

July 23, 2006

Summer morning, Sunday,

mild, humid, slight refreshing

breeze, sitting out at dawn beneath

circling bats, watching tiny

primordial spiders shimmy

their invisible cords

inspiration to aspiring Wallendas,

reading the master of

the mystical lyric, his childhood

prayer:

I wake to light that warms

My eye

And feel almighty God

Nearby,

wondering.

Theodicy, the problem of evil,

suffering on such a grand scale

if God is so nearby, why?

The conundrum thought by some

to be blasphemy, to others proof

of the shush of God since Sinai

or shortly thereafter when Rahab

the whore was saved from the falling

walls and fires of Jericho where man,

woman, child and beast were slain

to adhere to the Word of this same God

called upon to shelter us from harm:

O God, make speed to save us;

O Lord, make haste to help us:

suffrages of evening.

Through the panes of the French

doors, radiant warmth of walls

the color of sun rise draped

with the seasons in Chinese, summer

night pictured hotter than sun rise,

a Chinese fishing boat on the Sichuan

River, cormorants perched on the bow,

auspicious as a parliament of rooks,

harbingers of death:

Among the twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

Then I rose to rub

a head not yet bald,

like peering in to a crystal ball,

and I could imagine in a world

without God a black Mustang GT,

cormorants diving for fish with no retrieve

around their necks,

but not rain, nor the mystical eye

of the blackbird.

2006-07-21T04:47:00.000-07:00

July 21, 2006

Birds of the air...

Morning began with the psalms and W.S. Merwin…To the Corner of the Eye. The poem brought to mind Peter L. Berger’s A Rumor of Angels and the suggestion of Presence, tracers of the holy, the redemptive presence of a Christ

suffusing the empirical world. Joshua … ordered by the commander of the army of the Lord to remove his shoes;

he was on sacred ground, and so amidst the black-eyed Susans and as brown thrashers and red-bellied woodpeckers fed on the suet dough

I prayed

and in some small way re-sanctified again that little space beneath the blue canopy where I live…hope.

The hair remains the most discomfiting.

There is often the urge to tug on the back of the wig, to pull it down, to re-place it. It irritates the back of the head just above the nape around the occipital bone, that slight protrusion providentially provided as an anchor for a later day wig; the scalp, there, is reddened and rashy. It is hot. It is summer in Atlanta.

The wig…or its source, the hair loss…continues to be the cause of anger, the sign of the dis-ease. The hair doesn’t exactly fall out, in part because it has been sheared. Rather, it recedes in uneven patches. Thighs are smooth; calves still a bit stubbly, eye brows have thinned, lashes remain. You notice these small things, take account of them as if the proverbial birds of the air so attended to by the heavenly Father, and are we not of more value than they?

This is a reflection on that

which is

precious.

2006-07-13T02:16:00.000-07:00

July 13, 2006

Images before Prayer~

Out at 4:30AM beneath a moon that’s nearly full, trying to find even a feeble metaphor to equate its light, its unlikely and alien lightness in the dark purple sky…satin spar or home to the Selenites mining beneath its pearlish surface. First half of night spent in wonderful world of dream, color and complexity, cold winter, and rugged red stone a son fell from while doing rainbow jumps down it, a mid Idaho landscape, vast wintry high desert of ice; he quivered on the cold ground; I froze on an edge of the rock. And they say it is a world of reason! And that preceded by the dream of sleeping with P on the floor of a friend’s home, 2 dogs, one black and our Lucy I hugged to me complaining of the noise, noisy sons we complained about, one of whom farted in the face of P; I shouted at him; waking on the floor of a shower at midnight with young people who returned from somewhere and were headed somewhere and showering in between. And this is a logical world that corresponds to the logical construction of the brain. It’s all a thought disorder and I am the insane one.

Greeted the yellows with flowery thoughts rooted in the Hegel’s “oyster-like, gray, or quite absolute black” of god or the mind, or what does it mean anyway? The moon is distant from the sea, / And yet with amber hands / She leads him, docile as a boy.

These are the images before the day is sanctified by the little implement of prayer, the uplift of language flung toward God. Though already, before even leaving the covers, I rubbed my lucky Fuzzy…still there, some.

2006-07-11T05:36:00.000-07:00

July 11, 2006

Sitting at the white table~~

Walled in, I sit out

in the circle of supple light

bracketed by the yellow of wind

flowers visited by carpenter bees

stirring in my ear. Air

slightly scented by potted pink

of abelia, cardinals the color of salvia rattle

the boughs of the waxy leafed gardenias,

hedging the woods, already spent;

the space forms the velvet geography of prayer…

hide me under the shelter of your wings…

the psalmist’s plea in sun drenched desert,

landscape of the soul,

the secret bower of prayer,

a strange mystical warmth permeates

through the green as mosquitoes scuttle

the plans to pray out amongst the Zen of it.

Texture of a secure warmth, an accompanied

Silence; the rhythm of the birds’ flight

marks out a strange enchanting beauty,

a symmetry with the meter of the suffrages;

the rufous’ constant plea, Drink your tea,

as I sip the bitter of black coffee.

I am the chaplain of morning sorrows

taking up the offering of blind poets and the brown

thrasher, the head of an Ichabod,

plucking away at the suet dough,

head molted, distorted, as bald as my love

will be tomorrow, day six of treatment 2 of cycle 1.

Behind closed eyes, I lay my hands on that beloved

head and raise my plea, Be well for me, be well

for me.

2006-07-07T03:52:00.000-07:00

July 7, 2006

I thought that pain meant

I was not loved.

It meant I loved.

And so the silence of morning

pierced by birdsong,

or is it the celestial music

of ravishing angels that heralds the day?

I glimpsed myself

in the blinking of an eye

a flame, a ravaging fire,

Elijah’s chariot drawn by horses of fire,

ascending

up into heaven: the meaning,

perhaps, of God, or the answer

to prayer: in this vision the uplift

from out of the mire into glory intended,

or perhaps it is the answer to nothing,

but is the fact of prayer…presence intensified,

oracular.

The perfect bright-yellow radii

of the head of the sunflower

splinters the dark morn, light

remembering its colors, its proper

nature that darkness cannot swallow up:

in morning’s shattered, though lambent light,

everything’s growing so lush,

space flower-filled, roses

stretching up into the canopy of dogwood.

How will it all fit in August? But

there’s this too to the day yet to come:

after the vision of fire, the face

soft and slightly mapped, the doctor

under whose direction the chemicals

will be administered: how fragile the earth;

how strange compassion under the aspect

of intelligence

melds to put off…some…

the loss of what has been loved:

how fragile the eternal

...the infinite.

2006-07-02T15:43:00.000-07:00

July 2, 2006

My nude

My mother thinks my wife of 34 years is going to die,

The mother of my two sons.

I mean, the big picture is…my mother is right. She is still

Of the time when cancer was a precursor to death and death

Being the final insult, still, that it is makes cancer a secret…for shame,

For insult.

My wife is losing her hair…not at this moment dying…

What is left of it that I have not sheared.

Feelings about shearing one’s spouse and about the loss of hair,

And do I recommend you do it too, god forbid you have the opportunity:

The indignity of all the poking, prodding, injecting, lumpectomizing (x2),

Etc., etc., etc., do not equal the indignity of the loss

Of hair, I can

Tell you this…I am there…she is, emphatically.

But the shearing itself brings, oddly, a kind of posteriori

Masochistic satisfaction…or, there is no real satisfaction in it

Of any kind, but there is a fear of taking some delight

In participating in the spoiling of that for which you care.

The way it works is, you pretty much have to say, Now is the day

Because on the bathroom floor and in the sink…hair…and

It has been 14 days, and Monday is work and the work means

The wig, and we have to prepare it and for it.

And you do it, and thank god, really, in the morning she says,

My skin feels different. That’s the satisfaction: a relief

That you, that is I, didn’t just mutilate someone…something’s

Really going on in there. Then you say, god, I shouldn’t feel relief,

But you do not because something’s going on in there,

But because what you did was important, good, caring, and difficult.

It could have been done by Gary her hairdresser, or

It could have been done by David at the Women’s Store

At Northside Hospital where we purchased the wig.

It could have been done with great fanfare in the backyard

With sons, friends, wine and barbecued ribs.

But it was done in the kitchen alone except for a little

Beefeaters for each of us, and obscured mirrors for her

Until this morning. It was sad and tender and intimate

And ours…alone. There was neither pity, humor, nor small talk.

There were fantastic stuffed grilled hamburgers

Before hand to beef us up.

And now its done. And there was a walk along the river in scarf

And hat this morning…a coming out. And there was a returning

Home and shampooing the wig and getting it to fit right

And 2 or 3 hours of reassurance from a son and me; and there

Was going out to the market in the wig…a second coming

Out. And it is all okay, until Friday when the 2^nd treatment

In the 1^st cycle of chemotherapy is repeated: 3 hours of it,

Then back to work and feeling okay for a day or 2

Then, well some of it is our own, but on the day god said,

Let the waters be gathered together in one place,

And let there be dry land, that is on the 3^rd day, she will need rest,

For even god needed it after the 7th day and she is

Good, but she is not god.

I admit as well a certain titillation in seeing my hairless nude,

A little upturn of lips…a wink.

2006-06-28T06:50:00.000-07:00

June 28, 2006

Mysticism of morning

Dawn once a time of poets and prayer

as the gestalt of night shatters into protean

and multifarious forms of day:

for years I rose predawn to hear…

to listen for signs of God…

alone my soul in silence waits

from whence cometh my help…?

and hear the majestic choir of dawn

in birdsong and rain spatter.

Patience, I’ve come to know,

grace of the weak.

Too soon old…too late wise,

the proverb

now taken to heart as I convert late

and gray, god was born

stonedeaf…as silent

as the ceiling, the counterpoint

of mornings’ dawns.

Truth, goodness, beauty,

and holiness of being

are lodged in this: the hierarchy

of regard per omnia saecula saeculurum.