Second Terrace

Lenten Fairy Tales, Third

One of the old buddy pigs came running and found me
when I went to ground,
napping in the moldering afternoon,

and reminded me
porcine

that one cannot be in two places

at one time

"that," said he, "is the stuff of the insanity of theoretical physicists.

"At least," sniffed he, "my brethren of the Gadarenes, had the sense
to run over the cliff
when they heard such stuff," said he.

Paradise or pig.

Passion and multiverse.

Or bread and wine, water and air in the anamnesis House.

"one or the other," said he the pig

"I don't give a fig what you do,

but choose." 

Lenten Fairy Tales, Second

Along the way a spade appeared, jabbed in dirt.

I knew he was down there so I dug him up:
he looked "really good," the same

which is what you'd expect after a lifestyle of self-embalming.

"My brothers," he simpered, "one got five and the other three,
so I kept mine for me

"and dug a hole,
and just to be sure,
climbed in for safekeeping.

"Please, if you will, kindly replace the divots?
Can't stand the sun, you see."

Gee.

At least I was sanguine with my nature,

not melancholy. 

Lenten Fairy Tales, First

There is an enormous pig farm in western Ohio where I woke up at, sandwiched between two slats of slate, the jagged sky and the washed out between-snows wintered earth.

I found this notebook in the dirt when I learned to read a word.

I have these early recollections, as Adler-not-Mortimer would say. My lifescript. My romantic programme, a la Berlioz. You know how it goes. Jejune puerile restlessness, liberation exhiliration, experimentation, crisis, boredom, ennui, depression, entertainment/diversion as self-medication, long dull suicide, the bourgeoisie regime.

Must get up. Memory of substance, the images dissipate in gray. Memory persists as the shadows fade.

Does the Father welcome back errant cognoscienti?

Any cognoscienti?

Perhaps as a scrivener, an archivist, a duster, someone to run the shredder, a repairer of crumbling books.

Un-sonned, sure, but one for hire.

Counseling note, little and bright

-- Edward Hopper, "Pennsylvania Coal Town," 1947

He sat down in my office, in the oversized jet-leather club chair, nestled by the literary bookshelf (across from the two shelves of bible and theology).

He was tired. His face showed the downturned use of some years of a low-rent, on and off again shop job, punctuated by a bimonthly visit to a smoke-hazed oldies bar just blocks away from his 1950s ranch-style home, where his dog awaited him, tail wagging, every late afternoon.

He is a refugee from all the old charismatic waves that washed over the Burgh since the early 70s. He's visited about every single phase of emotion and claimed every promise. He's made a lot of positive confessions that have not worked out, and so weary he's entered our old and open doors.

Now he's gotten into difficulty again, and that's real and very hard. We will have to help him through with real practical plans. Who will take care of his loyal dog, who will wait for him every afternoon for the month that he's away? Who will watch his family home, of which he is the last of, out-surviving his mom and dad and sister and brothers? Who will cut the grass and sweep the walk these incarcerated days?

He is amazingly gentle and kind, merciful to the gruff and uncompassionate peers that surround his daily schedule. He's been scuffed, worn and torn by a lot of hard knocks, but the bitter speech, so expected, doesn't show.

He wears a coat and tie to church, sometimes threadbare, but "I want to look my best for God" he says.

I hear his narration, and I want to denounce the powers and anyone else, but he heads me off with "Whatever happens now I'll take from the Lord, as something I need to receive."

So we practice the whitelight arts of the Jesus Prayer and the Trisagion, then. I talk to him about the Liturgy and the Holy Mysteries, and about the ecclesial rehearsals of Heaven on earth.

(It is especially at a moment like this that I take refuge in old-fashioned christology, when and in Whom divine nature might meet human nature, Personally. Christology is best done, I think, on the discarded streets of the world's refugees.)

We begin to speak in tongues of angels -- or rather, the tongues of the Word made flesh. "I can do all things through Christ Who strengtheneth me." "If God be for us who can be against us?" "Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world." "Perfect love casteth out all fear."

I swear to you all, upon the Altar and Heaven itself, that the air began to brighten at the iteration of these words. I felt the ebbing of the bleak tide.

He stood up after the prayer and smiled with a smile that the world thinks is unbecoming of the poor: but in the Kingdom, a smile such as this makes all the sense in the world.

Handshake, embrace of the meek.

He left, a small man, and I remained, just as small.

... for they shall inherit the earth.

Vesper Hill

There is an old rugged cross on top of Vesper Hill,

at a place in the unimportant hills around the Youghiogheny,
a church camp -- everything you thought a place like that should be:
fires in the nightwoods, fervent altar calls, intensities
counterpointed with softball games and furtive explorations.

One late evening, in 1977 by the two by six white cross,
perched up from a pile of the ubiquitous sandstone that lay
strewn in the third-growth tangle of laurel and adolescent maple,

The dark solitude hoped for was attained,
and beauty was apophasis,
the zodiac and a pious congregation of fireflies
mingled enlightened, catephatically.

I go there, time travelling, now on the green bare knoll.

My old friends are lesser now, the old caretaker long dead
and his replacement we just buried.
The new mown grass they just cut and the river mist,
the fields at rest, exhaling from the sunwork of the day,
the touch of fires long gone out and the nightwind murmuring
the song the surf on ocean sound:

breathe, urban chest and sedentary, breathe
the anodyne air.

Here, high and dark, but for the silver gleaming. 

You, there and everywhere:
the finding at the cross,
always, at every loss,

I have thirty five years of new memory and new friends,
but they are older than the old ones, frailer, windblown
weathered, time torn.

Thou, Lifegiver on Vesper Hill
transmute the past
and change this time,

Take these determined libertines,
these darkened trends of passionate ends,
these wonted ires of dialectical fires,
these political thrusts of childish distrusts,
these unwitting tools of rich young fools,
these teenage passions for old transgressions,
these  alarums, these turmoils, these alacrities to portend

a foreigner, when in the eastern light
it was a Friend.

These determinations
are obeisances to the Iron Crown,
post-structural, post-industrial.

They are mountainous, lugubrious
in a Gnostic, post-Constantinian vein.

What about the older canons, before the cassocks
and the boundary lines, the tutelage of the Borgia rhymes,
before the habits of The Prince:

What about the canon of the cross and wind,
the arched paternity of sabbath rest,
the one that goes Let us love each other
so that with one accord we may confess?

What about that canon,
forgotten in time
buried by the rest? 

Satan, get thee behind me,
This gray mountain to the sea. 

Thou, Vesper Wind, whisper peace again amongst the leaves,
wend and waft where You wish,
make us born again.

Here, at the real Vesper Hill, 

I pray and stay.

Modern friendship

 

So, which persona shall we dress today?

I just took in le Carre, so shall we play the Circus game?
Let us splay out our little squalid zone, mercator-like,
and move our friends and unfriends on a Risk display.

Let alone the fact that none of us are smart enough
for intelligence, disciplined enough
for the dark agenda we wish for and assay.

I know: we'll dally in Machiavelli, and resort to footnotes
of the Medici, the Borgia, the Renaissance ecclesiology that built
St. Peter's and gild our conversation with Cosimo's gold brocade. 

But we are neither hard enough nor cultured
even to take the proper fork at service a la russe,
even to stay sang froid in a small-minded repartee.

Shall we try psychology or history or anything but theology?
It is fun and fine to cast our passion in so much academe
and mark the mob's insanity, and diagnose the fey.

The Bible is merely fundamental and theology so personal:
why should we mention Jesus or the Cross?
He will ruin everything, not a table left unturned.
Unsophisticated, bumpkinesque, that plain provincial meekness,
and every word a toll, so short and hard, sharp and stone, eternal.
The infinite is so droll.
He makes me feel so cross. 

Let's not talk of God today:
we'll fix our mask and play the masque
and tongue our dreary weltanschauung,
you do not fit there after all,
except your value for the task.

We'll go our separate ways. 

A different third hour

It was nine o'clock and they thought we were drunk,
the only conventional explanation for
the difference.

I was a rustic fisherman, with nimble fingers tying knots
and cursing the luck of barren nights ...
now I am a theologian
with inexorable rhetoric.
I sing the new song
that preserves difference
but surmounts distance
in a Word. 

I was a wealth-protecting publican, really a tax-collector
who knew how to calculate funds and derivatives to pad my accounts
while the houses of brothers withered in the hot wind
of occupation ...
now I am the almoner who gives to all the poor,
builds hospitals for all the sick and hurt,
I drain all accounts and cancel every interest,
less than zero.

I was a swordsman, an insurrectionist,
a shouter on the barricades, a revolutionary,
hand me your newest gun in every generation ...
now I am a pacifist
and a forgiver of all past insults and injuries,
I drain all history and the chains of vendetta,
my anger is quenched
on a single tear of grace. 

I was a modern, speaking in the lesser tongues
of thrill
and loved my feelings and bourgeois comforts
of chips and beers and points at games
and politicians who made me mad ...
now I attend a church of empty pews,
listening to the true new song,
getting metaphysical,
Trinitarian,
for once,

and speaking the word, finally,
of love. 

Two ways

There are two ways to fly,
perhaps not
mutually exclusive.

One is to fall
and simply miss the ground,

though this is hard to do
deliberately.

The other is to forgive

which is embracing the ground
actually
and reversing the fall. 

Come back, Arius

Come back, Arius, you ascetical rake,
feet first up from the public jakes,
We need a better heresiarch again.

At least you said the Son was one through Whom
all things that are things were made,
even though, you said,
there was a time when the Son was not.

We live in a time when they say the Son is not.

They say, in study guides and resolutions,
in charters signed with heterodox and heretics,
with monotheists and pantheists, gnostics, agnostics
and, even, atheists

That taking the trouble, like you, to fight for homoiousios,
to struggle and demand anomean,
they say that you were just misunderstood and unaccepted,
that Athanasius the Mean did irreparable harm
to your self-esteem

Which today is taken for salvation.

You, where you finally landed,
would have known what to call that piece of logismoi.

What would you have done, Arius,
with Conferences and Commissions who "vote" post-modernistically,
not even brave enough to do it atheistically?

At least you made little songs, like the evangelicals,
that the people could sing,
instead of the boring diatribes of the mean Athanasius
(contra, contra mundum).
At least you did not put out study guides
that are no guide to study.

What would you have done, Arius,
with embryonic vivisectionists?
With infanticidal collusionists?
With egalitarian anti-dogmatists?
With scriptural deconstructionists?
With anthropological revisionists,
who bless erotic arrangements of varied number
and ordain the unordainable?

What would you have down with clown masses
and Our Mother who art in Heaven?

Arius, what would you say, from your pit,
for after all, you were a chaste presbyter
with your seven hundred virgins:

At least you believed in the Son,
though degenerately.

Arius, heresiarch, I prefer you to the alternatives,
for to call the present mass of conferences "Arians"
is a slander on you, even where you sit.

Come back, Arius, for I know what you'd say,
even this Sunday,
with no irony,
Anathema.

But this is speaking in tongues
to a crowd who's forgotten
all that is themata.

You, Arius,
might as well stay where you are.

I asked Dr. Hart about my broken window

On this the Eve of the Theophany
Right before the appearance of the Holy Trinity
And the revelation of the Second Adam
A guy, I'm sure a guy,
Hammered my passenger side window
And swiped my little garmin
The one with a cute aussie voice that tells me
How to go from one house to another
Blessing with the Jordan Water.

So what I am to do
With this smash and grab?

Just home from the glass repair,
Found out that it wasn't just the window
But the little motor that makes it go up and down, too

There have been many of those, "too's"

The insinuationists are hard at work in my ear:
It was a guy from the apartments next door,
They're so unkempt, migratory,
They argue and do strange incantations and deflections on the F word in my parking lot
At the witch's hour:

Gr-r-r -- there go, my heart's abhorrence!

Or it was a guy from the high school that let out today for MLK
With nothing better to do.

I know what to do,
I'll fix a zorch, vaskania, a peculiar eye on that vandal guy,
(I'm sure he doesn't know about the blue marble)

But I don't know what he looks like,
So a wish, a little curse, will have to do.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.

May my garmin lead you in paths of foolishness.
May you only get ten dollars on ebay.
May it never work right.
May it get you lost and despair.

And it is night (you know where).

No. May it keep you in the day.
May it save you, despite yourself.

So instead, I think of others to complain of
Since the poor, even thieves, I must love.

Ah yes.

The rich. They are always there
For my dialectic.

Hear this, you cows of Bashan:
Why don't you get your nuvi's or tom-toms grabbed
And windows smashed?

Isn't it unjust to live behind gates
And far removed in exurban zones
With streets named for developer's daughters,
Rolled out grass, instant neighborhood (add water),
No fruit stand, no store,
no manure spreaders for sure,
too zoned.

Isn't it unjust to send the robbers
To rob, not the rich, but the less poor?

It is night again.

I asked Dr. Hart about my broken window,
And my burgled gps.

And he said I mustn't think that this was necessary,
That I, like Ivan's one little infant,
Do not need to think that my little suffering was planned
For some arbitration of a greater Plan.
There will come an End when broken windows are mended,
And no need of navigation.

Well, yes.

As usual, with philosophers pail,
The answers are less cheering than ale,
And certainly more expensive than beer.

So I looked up the thirty-seventh psalm with its usual good advice.
Be still. Commit and trust.
Take delight. Do good.
From anger refrain.
Be meek.
Better is a little that the righteous have.

It is the mind of the baptized,
I know.

But things come together and seem orchestrated from below.
The night falls damp and chill,
And its black river flows wide,
Hiding the other shore
That must I cross in the morning.

It is always thus, these days.

So I will take the mantle tomorrow,
On the bank of the Jordan.
The water will I strike
And call, "Where is the Lord God of Elijah?"

In this new dispensation
There are no more human villains,
No evil men who may be imprecated
Only the violent, they of bloody hands,
And they are not men but malevolent.

A whole cavern of broken windows and stolen compasses,
But no hand worse than mine.

No curse other than those self-imposed.

No evil eye than I.

I will come to my senses
and call on His Name
Which is written in light toward the End,
Who draws out Leviathan with a fishhook,

And laughs in the whirl of the wind.