Excerpts from
living with what remains …

One Day

One day,

before the earth grew old

and mostly bald and full of stink,

one day I woke to music,

to a twitter in the trees that rose

and fell like exhalations

of the earth itself —

a breathing, a gargling

of the morning air

in bright polyphony, in crisp staccato.

And I knew

the birds were prophesying —

knew I heard the voice of God,

sweeter than the earth itself,

rising like a counterpoint,

an arching, aching tremolo —

heard the wild of Him

that we have tamed

come bursting loose in feathers

and arpeggios

and yearnings inexpressible,

too large and small

for syllables

that slip into our narrow ears;

and so I stood and listened

to the world

as He described it,

listened to the reveling,

and knew that I was born for this —

knew that sparrows sing epiphany

at dawn each day,

and breathe the earth’s core

in and out,

and feather all that breathes

and flies and sings, and I must sing,

must sing, must sing,

and this is my arpeggio,

my only syllable.

And He Turns

God looks over His shoulder,

and He sees us in our waiting,

sees us hem-and-hawing, standing there,

needing Him, not wanting to disturb Him.

Then He turns — so slow and simple,

like a rainbow at its bending,

like a great, brown river curving,

like the reaching of the eagle in the majesty

of gliding.

He turns, like the warp and stretch of seasons

in their cycle — February melting into April,

March slow-greening into May.

He turns, the way He taught the earth

to balance on its axis;

He turns like the eager flex of sun come forth

to cover us each morning.

He turns, and all things stop their spinning,

stop their churning; all passing things created

cease their racing and their fretting.

He turns, and all things wait for Him,

and wait with Him, and yearn with Him.

He gathers up our wanting in His voice.

I Bring To You

the great spotted cat that lopes across the pampas,

its soft pads tracing ancient trails.

The bright burn of its eyes pierce the darkness.

They will rivet your soul.

And here — accept the giant turtle,

his dome precisely furrowed

like a clot of knobby earth. He swam the seas

before the siege of Vicksburg,

rode the backs of waves that pounded brigantines,

dug himself out of a sandy birth-tomb

when this land was still a virgin.

He dies in our nets and is cast upon the waters.

The oceans grow old now —

like xeriscapes collapsed to skeletal remains.

Consider the writhe of the probing marlin,

scales aquiver;

it follows its hunger, caught in heating currents

which follow winds

that have lost their way above us.

Look up. The wind probes new trajectories,

lapping up clouds,

spitting them out in fury at the hapless earth.

Beyond the reach of its unending scythe,

the lone eye of the sun

regards us with dispassion, never blinking.

Faux autumn creeps across the ancient greenwood

with its trompe-l’oeil —

rust and bronze and amber, a swatch of lethal colors.

Forests whittle down to shanks of stick and stone.

Listen. Perched among the ruins, owl cries “Whooo?”,

opens his hooded eyes, and waits upon his echo.

Again and again he calls,

turning his eyes upon us with his question . . . .

This I bring to you as well.

Living With What Remains

the quiet hours now,

when darkness settles down among us . . .

crickets ratcheting their evening chorus,

dogs on patrol, describing their peripheries,

jasmine spilling — seductive woman of the night.

and we are almost seduced; it’s almost believable —

our ancient theory that the world is round,

when we know that it is flat, and caving in.

we have scraped the skin from this virgin clay,

carved its shanks and bled its veins,

filled its verdant cracks with solder,

blown our foul breath up its bristly hills,

down tangled valleys — all the while extolling it,

cajoling it with sculptured lawns and piped-in

waterfalls which suck on long, thin straws

that drain its belly.

what remains we cannot yet decipher,

nor give to it a name, but we hear beneath it all

that voice of grief which echoes through

the thinning trees and wails along the shallow

prairies — night music Amadeus never dreamt of.

We will be peasants once again upon

this scrap of earth.

We must tend it well, this remnant left to us,

must shelter it from this inclemency,

Lest we forget we ever loved the night.

The One True Thing

Believe in what you always knew.

It has not forgotten you.

Call it back to you; it will come out of hiding.

Coax it patiently.

Like a wild thing caught in a snare,

it will observe you guardedly —

examine you for the scent of guile.

Behold it — this sudden stranger

to your patterned thought,

this outcast waiting quietly at the fringe.

Do not measure it. Open your arms and

receive the weight of it in your narrow grasp.

Hold steady — it will grow feather-light in time.

Let it tell you everything it knows.

Everything. Listen.

Live with it, perhaps uncomfortably,

until you are conformed,

until your face in the mirror crinkles

with a shaft of delight

and speaks back to you in a beautiful new tongue —

and you know at last who you are, and why.

Now you are ready to brave the world.

Now you are ready to save it.