stick

What makes grace stick?

Stick against the ribs,

like peanut butter coating the stomach,

oatmeal in the bosom;

what makes it stay and

last through each and into every day?

What mechanisms need be operated

what hurried or unhurried phrases to guarantee

or acts again-membered?

what words iterated

what water-shakers sprinkled

what breads broken and consumed

what

what

what will make grace stick?

Look how we stand here fragile, shaking

as if it was cold and not just our own unease;

Look how we wait here vulnerable, wondering

still unsure whether the answer will stick

when we hear, perhaps for the first time

it's been a long day, admit it, so long a day

it's hard to remember, hard to hold together

all passed by this way, all in this same long day.   

reflection on poetry writing, waiting and redemption

Can it be the case what I hope to be untrue about the world is what I write about? That I intimate my suspicions, my fears about the nature and quality of created life? Do I doubt that goodness can last or issue forth after such violence and tragedy that casts history's meaning into doubt? Do I believe that God will remedy and restore the infinite indiscretions and failures that characterize human existence?

Will God redeem it all? What will it mean for all to be redeemed? Is it conceivable? Have I given myself the time and attention required to trust this God who promises redemption, this God who holds together Shoah and Hiroshima, Gomorrah and Golgotha, together in himself, this God who creates all that is through himself and sustains all that is through himself? This God who is more intimate than any of my numerous appendages, more intimate than synapses firing in my brain, more intimate than a beloved's breath pressed against the bare skin of my neck? This God who is more distant than my sight of the neighboring galaxy, more distant than my awareness of the synapses firing in my brain? How can this God hold it together? Fully removed, fully involved. Privy to all things, subject to nothing.

God inhabits counter dictations, competing words who fashion alternative worlds: intimacy and removal, deep involvement and critical distance. Who's to say that God's not all of this, all of this and more? Who's to say and not say what God can and can not be? Certainly, it would seem there are boundaries, edges between the trustworthy and speculative, but these are edges who strain with the resonant notes of historical fluidity, the enduring notes of occasional porousness. Can we hold it together as we wait to see if God can hold it together? How long will we be waiting, or has God already answered and we've been too busy asking the questions, too busy speculating on our speculations while God's been busy speaking Swahili and teaching Kenyan street boys a resurrection song?

Don't miss out on what God's doing. Don't miss out because you've removed yourself, under the banner of critical reflection; this distance which you carry as a burden with you, this open wound, is meant to be healed, all this time, meant to be healed. Let God's doing, do his thing here.

A Psalm for Cloud-chasers

How long will this cloud be with us,

day and night, without end?

casting god-sized shadows on sun and moon alike,

here impatient wills tap feet anxiously,

persistently since the First Crossing.

When the cloud lifts, we're supposed to follow?

Why does this following seem like a game of chase?

“Israel, a nation of cloud-chasers,”

other nations will mock in unison

their voices rising high over the earth,

“Israel drags an empty balloon

before us, behind us,

a vacuous balloon

waiting to be inflated by their god's presence.”

What reply is there to give? And if already here,

then when may we give it?

We are stalling, desperate all the time

for the balloon to soar against desert sky

and remind us that we're not impotent magicians,

unable to conjure life in the wilderness, instead

that we're promise-laden sons and daughters

waiting for his coming.

In that hour, his hour and ours with YHWH,

the nations will tremble

for one moment beneath the cloud

produces the crushing weight of annihilation

or ecstatic joy of triumph

not ours alone, but his with us.

Raise the banner of your involvement, O YHWH,

we shout aloud before these settled nations,

become to us the one who acts on our behalf

may this cloud become a substantial sign

upon which we may build our present hope

and future satisfaction. 

Strangers to hope

We did not always have these words:

ways to be like him and unlike the world

ways to find him and ourselves

ways to become ourselves in the world

God was not always here with us.

Long stretches of centuries,

filled by the strivings of ignorant, contented living

changeless, endless centuries

projected like corridors without beginning and end

all through which we traveled and travailed,

until disrupted by a host of great acts

uprooting the world's foundations

and our foundations in the world.

We were now faced with such an offer:

God's claim to be with us and over us

created out of the sterile ruins of wilderness,

the possibility of abundant life:

life-after-desert.

We were strangers to this hope.

Strangers to:

covenant dealings

divine showings

but we were never strangers to

human longings

facing uncounted weary

days and nights

that is, before now—until now.

Teach us to count the days,

to number in our memories

in the stories we tell our children

to re-mark with our telling

be re-made in our hearing

the dusk of your nearing

the nights of our waiting

the dawn of our hoping

the days of your appearing

Remind us to recount your words,

to memorialize in our minds

and mark with our bodies

the deep through which you've brought us

—pain and joy a thousand years overwhelming—

the height to which you'll bring us

and the promise to be filled out that

all strangers to hope will find home with you.

Prayer of Today

Brothers and sisters

wait and watch

life unfolds in the retelling,

whose story comes to us?

They are man and woman, like us:

naivete and desire led to our rupture,

what is it now?

Today, what maintains this rupture,

Today, what rebuilds?

Lord, teach us, today,

Today, reveal what is an alternative:

two ways are set before us

life and death, blessing and cursing,

a world devouring, a world renewing

we are caught like deers in the headlights

between two worlds

Today, we would heal this rupture,

Today, turn toward life,

Lord, keep us, today,

Today, walk with us

and set our feet upon life's way.   

Weary Year

During a weary year

our own lives washed away,

worn down on the sanded sea bank

like polished whale bone

or the filmy salt lines residing

between the dead shore and living sea.

We came upon a new day,

like a freshwater current overpowering

a salt-struck river

in that day we drank deep,

injected life into this year's veins

put meat onto bones

and life into meat

and our own lives restored,

like energized whales

departing into deep waters.  

Night Vigil (to YHWH)

We keep the night for you.

On the plains of Goshen

you kept vigil one dreaded night

in death-thick darkness

you stayed alert, awake on our behalf

though you'd been sleeping four hundred years.

Now we'll keep vigil for you

beyond all millenniums,

if only to say thank you perpetually,

even if we've lost sight

of how our vigil still awaits you

—even now, especially now.

Knowing Twilight (formerly Plato's Twilight)

We meet our condition at twilight,

like a weary mother going out to meet her son

who's stayed out all day without reason, without word,

and whose return puts the world back together.

Who could have imagined that this hour

so close to darkness

could become the situation for such joy.  

doubt

cast your conviction to the winds

your nightly dictations, fall

on deaf ears, framed

by downy pillows who muffle

all sound beneath their undulating subtleties,

too smooth for rough skin, clad

with age lines, glistening

like canyons newly drowned

your words carry no iteration, emptied

of form, contentless words, floating

along the current of whim toward unknowable places

nothing hinges our conversation

no worth-waiting-for-content suspected to emerge

all that's left, massive wake-that-is,

are the intimations of departure, fragmented hints

flowing onward and beyond-wards, destinations without destinies  

Possibility

Fall into the world, out of failed attempts to hold to the threads of a broken rope

propelled forward into the world, you will land

so many directions, it's a matter of trust cast into the air

there won't be much landing for a while, not for a long while

prepare for the indeterminate length that know no normal boundaries

sky and earth, here in the world, yet to be what it will be 

Virtuoso

teacher, master

you learned me virtues

every helping I wanted

I begged you to stop.

Stop.

Before I'm too full of virtue

there won't be no room for nothing else;

after days of virtue-pushing

you ask me late into the evening:

what else is there?

Do you ask as teacher or master?

Will you demand what you ask, when

will you demand, I can't seem to count costs now

convoluted arithmetics, obscured counting

between infinite objects and numbers,

no equitable treatment of my equation

no object named and scope limited

no purpose qualified or content quantified

just the endless filling, feeling endless—

is virtue really as unlimited as you say

as you exercise day over day

upon my malleable relation with you?

I want and don't want. Simultaneous hold,

body fixed at once in two locations

want and unwant, can't take back

what's come before is already always coming

will be, will be, will be coming, still

to imagine differently, indiscreet it may be

but enough posturing, embracing this bi-located

body-state-of-being, here I am, send me

to carry banners transfixed with light in these temporary corridors

betwixt and between, between

hoping and turning, turning and hoping

here I am, I can be nowhere else

but the two places I'm already coming from

and going to

will there be an end to this seems-infinite play?

Who, who, who can say? I will not know, not today,

nor any day soon, nor any day soon. 

appetite of the eyes

critical distance that permits me;
subtle demise
etched on pupils
by another force of light, many forces
of light;
subtle convergences,
obscure cousins of insight, nearly
unrecognized and living in the front yard
always at work sowing salt
in the garden.

our land?

Why can't we use this land to build another world?
Imagine a soil without ownership,
to speak another word than
onerous-transaction-reducing-all-to-economics-of-loss-prevention
who said it was yours to begin with?
Who taught you to hold so tightly?
Easier for the dispossessed, landless ones
come to terms with it—
exchange of worlds
measuring fistfuls of soil at a time;
we had little to begin with
little to lose at day's end
everything to gain
everything to gain

Insight

flash flood of God's memory
I am an enveloped vessel
aflame with light
fire cascading forward from fingertips
breath crescendo out from lips
burdened and unburdened
at once wholly myself, Wholly Other
never cause of Noah's weeping
nor equal cause of his rejoicing
but present nonetheless
flash flood of God's memory
I am an opened instrument
impelled with technique
mechanisms for glory
trained deep to the bones' memories [melody]
I can. I can do. I will do.
Set-body tasked with praise
flash flood of God's memory
I am.

Weary Bones

here where oceans blanket up a failing sun
weary bones set to the cold song of the seas
agitated saltwater cuts through exposed skins
naked rejection replays the freezing notes
whose penetrating resonance throbs with risks too great
like waves of ice crushing into the skin
naked fragility turns brittle in the night water
issue forth the elongated moan, death-whisper
against the crescendo of a sea of failures
washing over all, washing over all
unseen currents draw life away, particle by particle
toward the cloudy mess of undistinguished sea
and courses through glassy mirrors of an earth's surfaces

Triumph

creation is an empire
whose life evokes joy, shout and dance
whose decay only leaks from the fringes
seeps out from gutters in our ghettos
there's always more to an empire, always
more than marbled pillars, totems thrust
to glory in the sun, always
more than tended gardens, vines outstretched
to produce delight, always
the darker corners, shadow-kept crevices
who encroach and wait at the edges
between an empire's ecstasy and decay, [ecstasy vs. height]
Nietzsche's décadence misconceived, is nearby
days from now, late or soon
will force an empire's hand, attempt a
coup d'etat, and counter all prior claims of victory,
to encounter the reigning victor as defeated,
to supplant this empire's life-dance
and suspend its reigning ignorance [an ignorance long since pervading]
and enthrone in its place the inevitable,
the cold, the uncompromised and calculated,
the words to rehabilitate the world:
creation, no longer empire, but system
creation, no longer joy, but decay
a system is moving toward its ruins
soon or late, this system will fail;
any tenacious joy remaining
seeps from these reversely marked fringes
and is slipping toward decay, it's slipping,
slipping toward decay.

Improvisation

First, a proviso:
keep your eyes out
for the unexpected
stranger
wearing no persona
no masquerades to embellish
or weave a partial face
nor charades to caricature,
keep-eyes-open is the word
prepared at every season's turning
to show and be
welcoming,
everything hinges on
this show-your-cards event
signaling and alluding to
your first and final words
body-marked and gestured
which here invite a stranger
to enter into her welcome.

Last, a proviso:
keep your eyes out
faithful to follow the first,
faithfully conclude all improvisation
by repeating all welcomes, event-after-event [maybe event-upon-event?]
until all are no-longer-strangers
but end this play as friends-at-rest.