Second Terrace

Soon and very soon

Soon, my office window filled with a bare dogwood, I will go out and prune the tree. The pussy willows need looked at for Palm Sunday a month away. The detritus from the dead November winds should be raked away. Soon.

It is hard to believe in Spring. A succession of winters will do that: bury the evidence, the actual experience of surprise, the burst of April scattering the remnants of January. Not only do the slate horizons of winter dull memories of Spring, but so also the Sirius heat of August. Somewhere lost in the familiarities of gray chill and bronze burn is the cool, fresh brightness, the juvenescence of lilac, honeysuckle, lilies and apple blossoms whispering, sighing in the first pleasant evening, when I can walk hand-in-hand in the soft darkness on our brick lane. Soon.

But now, coke trains lumber on the long viaduct to the Edgar Thomson No. 1 & No. 3 blast furnaces in Braddock, past the empty hulks of the interminable Westinghouse plant, the background of my foreground dogwood tree. We hear them day and night, and the Port Authority buses that growl night and day, coaching the workers in and out of the City. These are the sounds of death and heat, inhumane necessities, wrath and want. Whitman was off by a long shot in his versification of industry: the sounds do not cheer me, they do not betoken human activity. They, too, obscure the Spring. Which is to come. Soon.

There are white women who bemoan black men, and wars waged for increasingly arcane, industrial reasons. There are hierarchs who have forgotten meekness and have remembered lesser rubrics at the expense of the greater dogmas. There are webmasters who knit shawls at guillotines, despots who assign guardian angels and saints to nukes, revisionists who would be happy to refashion a dusty old patriarchal hasbeen church into their own egalitarian, professional, uptodate image, where every bishop will answer to an oversight committee. There are 1 in 4 female adolescents stricken with STDs, fired admirals, embarrassed governors, shuttered McMansions, unpopular embattled Orthodox, Creed-ignorant ecstaticians.

These are the sounds of death and heat. They, too, obscure the Spring. Which is to come. Soon.

Only a community that is apostolic in sacrament and mystical work can sustain the life of Christian dogma through history. In other words, the Gospel of the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation – theology and economy proper – can only be articulated through a Body that actually believes this Gospel. Such a Body is led through history by bishops that see, with their hearts, the apostolic vision: they, and their clergy and faithful, can do this only through knowledge mediated by grace and works, in fear and trembling.

Time corrodes – as is characteristic of all Grace – all attempts outside the veil, or the “covering” of the sacred order, the authority of the Pillar of Truth. Bishops can be bishops, Church can be Church, only in the Biblical, Patristic sense – through ascesis, kenosis, the radically conservative Gospel revolution, mystical charisma. If otherwise, as has been seen too often in the deathworks, then these men and institutions will tend, inexorably and carnally, toward the abysmal poles of mainline (and sidelined) American anti-nomianism; or neo-Borgia-Medici-Frankish statism; or quasi-caesaro-papism that yearns for a third Rome. There is Rome enough, and that one is in Italy. There was once a New Rome: it did its ordained work of establishing Orthodoxy. It is gone. There was, and is, and will be, no other.

There is the state, of course, and I am not at all sure anymore that I know what, or where, it is. But it sure makes lots of money.

Culture has never been so loud and empty, so strident in its obfuscation, its mystification, its blinding and whining. It has a million ways to stand between the soul and the appearances, a million virtualities.

The Trinity, though, is beautiful. Christ is beautiful. Man finds his beauty (that is, meaning) in the redemption won by Christ. Church is this beauty, and redemption is Spring. Soon.

I have been despondent over death, and I have felt the winter as I have felt no other. But I remember the beauty of mercy this first week of the Fast, in the Canon. And I remember the Spring.

Soon.

Friend of all our then's

I am not a strong thinker,
And I confess an aversion to propositions.
My native apophaticism is due mostly to childishness,
Which, on occasion, rises to the silence of children
On Christmas morning, and the splendor of the first day
Of the summer holidays.
Gone for now, in this hospice,
Are the intellectualities of theory,
My ongoing denunciations of Bultmann, Ritschl,
And my codgerly debate with beloved Augustine.
They have faded, like the thick black band
Of a 45 on spindle, the arm gliding toward the end at center.
Silence, labored breath,
At the house of Mary and Martha, Lazarus.

But beyond the theories, above the Names,
Transcending the harmonic spheres and extended
Above the tines of Virtue that turn this quiet earth,
Is the bright darkness, the Friend Who presses
My heart, the center everywhere, circumference nowhere.
If You are Love, God, I need you, as a man in the tempest deep.
If You are Love, God, You are Person, for only persons can love.
If You are Person, God, You are Three,
For I have known Three of You in One, at every revelation, every time,
This time in the House at the edge of Time.

Father You ordained her in year and earth, hearth and heart
And called her, destined to the Day, athanatos, for the Son.
Jesus You fashioned her through the Law, for the Word,
Logos of wisdom, meaning, body and soul, star, spring and sand.
Spirit You breathed mystery, a flash of co-inherency at Dawn
In the secret womb, You comforted the sinner, the patient
Of this worldly infirmary, whispering, thundering truth beyond
Lyrics or musical convention, You gave life then, and for many then’s,
And all the then’s and the then’s of tomorrow, the Day …

And this “then,” at the Last Friendly House before the Unknown Lands.

O Most Holy Trinity, Friend of all our then’s,
You painted silver glass, ice, the dew of Hermes
Like argent cloisonné on this last day.
Slate rain, chromated branches,
Subdued green on the lawn,
Waiting, hushed,
For the Dawn of Spring,
The Breath on the waters,
The morning of the Son,
The Father’s Eden, once again, then,
Never end.

I am not a strong thinker,
But I can be a child
And pray this day.

A motto from Auden

... from our incoherence we
May learn to put our trust in Thee
And brutal fact persuade us to
  Adventure Art and Peace.

Since I haven't yet reached Christmas (the Feast will be this Monday), I am still reading, on the advice of the Ochlophobist, Auden's wondrous For the Time Being. Why is this out of print? Is it too literalistic for the postconservative mood? Is it too poetic for the pragmatic marketplace?

The above iambic trimeter -- in particular, "Adventure Art and Peace" -- is another of my New Year's resolutions. I may post more, from today's civil New Year until the Julian procession a week from now.

Here is the context from "The Summons," in W. H. Auden's For the Time Being:

V. CHORALE

Our Father whose creative Will
  Asked Being for us all
Confirm it that Thy Primal Love
May weave in us the freedom of
The actually deficient on
  The justly actual.

Though written by Thy children with
  A smudged and crooked line
The Word is ever legible
Thy Meaning unequivocal
And for Thy Goodness even sin
  Is valid as a sign.

Inflict Thy promises with each
  Occasion of distress
That from our incoherence we
May learn to put our trust in Thee
And brutal fact persuade us to
  Adventure Art and Peace.

Porphyry Field

Outside
In the night
I walk on this near horizon
Between the cold glories of the star field
And the loam of root and stem, twig and potential leaf

The air is winter
Clean it scours the face
And bathes it with welcome cold:
December light flung through the sable abyss
With the gentle frosted hexameters gleaming, suspended

Until a singular crystal
Beyond prediction, reproduction
Settles on my brow, melts, the water of heaven:
As once, when beauty from everlasting, the begotten One,
Substantially came and robed in the lesser garb of our familiarity:

Adam again, Son of Man,
Son of God, the perfected Adam obedient,
Who, as God become man, brought man to God.

My nature restored, like brown lands in spring, in forest and field;
My cancerous sin removed, like a spotted goat replaced by the Lamb of God.
My destiny of death and absurdity remastered, like an ironic tragedy
Turned, by a well-placed bon mot,
Into a comedy of romance divine.

Come with me,
I am no shepherd of sheep,
And only an aspirant to a fisher of men.
Walk with me in this amber porphyry, the twilight of a winter’s eve
In the sleeping wheat fields of the Laurel Highlands. See the lane barely wide

Enough for a summer hay wagon
And a bicycle for a well-meaning refugee from Pittsburgh
And an occasional rig from Ohler’s Sawmill down the road, a dented pickup
Gearing past, droning down the hill toward the Casselman, hay stalks scattering
In its wake, and the long sun of the dappled fields surrounds my family plot with August glory.

But that was last summer.
The old graves are white with winter dust
And lateness of the rapid night: Look deeply
Into the footsteps, and in the indentation of ice
Is the indigo of a passing year. I am told that this is due
To the ionization of crystals, charged by friction with the air:

It is the electricity of the spheres
Shown blue in cemetery fields
On Christmas Day,
In glory for the revelation
Of the Son of Man.

A Christmas Narration

from
For the Time Being: a Christmas Narration

by W. H. Auden (who ought to be read more)

IV. NARRATOR

These are stirring times for the editors of newspapers:
History is in the making: Mankind is on the march.
The longest aqueduct in the world is already
Under construction; the Committees on Fen-Drainage
And Soil-Conservation will issue very shortly
Their Joint Report; even the problems of Trade Cycles
And Spiralling Prices are regarded by the experts
As practically solved; and the recent restrictions
Upon aliens and free-thinking Jews are beginning
To have a salutary effect upon public morale.
True, the Western seas are still infested with pirates,
And the rising power of the Barbarian in the North
Is giving some cause for uneasiness: but we are fully
Alive to these dangers; we are rapidly arming; and both
Will be taken care of in due course: then, united
In a sense of common advantage and common right,
Our great Empire shall be secure for a thousand years.

   If we were never alone or always too busy,
Perhaps we might even believe what we know is not true:
But no one is taken in, at least not all of the time;
In our bath, or the subway, or the middle of the night,
We know very well we are not unlucky but evil,
That the dream of a Perfect State or No State at all,
To which we fly for refuge, is a part of our punishment.

   Let us therefore be contrite but without anxiety,
For Powers and Times are not gods but mortal gifts from God;
Let us acknowledge our defeats but without despair,
For all societies and epochs are transient details,
Transmitting an everlasting opportunity
That the Kingdom of Heaven may come, not in our Present
And not in our Future, but in the Fullness of Time.
Let us pray.

Thanks, Ochlophobist, for reminding me of this necessary poem.

Two Brothers Worry About Hell

RE: your recent complaint about cybernautics

Jonathan,
I once thought of hell as an endless casino
filled by old ladies mindlessly pulling the lever
on the slot machine.
Looks like I'm going to have to update it.
That is the future I dread.

Benjamin,
it is a sad thing that our visions of the future
(prior to the Last Day, of course) approach ever closer
the anti-mythical reality of an intermediate state.

It used to be bad enough imagining
polyester-clad Budweiser-sotted
grandchildren-evading
Hasselhoff-fantasizing sexagenarians huddling,
under walpurgisnacht-fluorescence,
over dinging, ringing, flashing incubi dressed up like teletubbies,
leering for quarters thrust in their slots.

It was bad enough when we had to drive
our bored grandmothers "over there,"
to wherever this hell was,
across the Styx into New Jersey,
over the Desert of Sin for forty years to Las Vegas,
or to the pre-Dead Sea happy sodom city of Monte Carlo,
the perfected mass opiate consciousness of Marx,
Groucho and Karl.

But now there is no there anymore.
In the cyber den, virtuality has no here or where.
The Hades of Nowadays requires no trip,
no regrettable bus ride with sour things dying
behind the mysterious back door,
no need for a free roll of quarters
and a musty ham sandwich with chips on the parkway,
and the obligatory stop at Bus City
with a million bus bays and gas for all,
and the pall of fumes, toxic gray,
humid fly-strewn cloying hot.

No need for that now.
You don't need to "go" "there".
There has come to here.
"There" has plunged, like a silver needle
into your prefrontal cortex,
a "no place" filled with pretty, glowy things
that you reach for, but cannot grasp.

Tell me what,
before we got so befuddled by photons and microvolts,
what we used to call that condition.
Tell me what it is.
Tell me where.

The Table of the Star

I started my holidays with sad people.

Every year, my friend Pat the Funeral Director invites the families of the recently-deceased to a Christmas reception. There is a prayer (which was my job) and a little meditation. At the end, Pat reads off the names of those he helped bury over the past year, and one by one, the families come up to receive a little ornament to hang on their Christmas Tree, a bittersweet ivory and silver memento mori bearing the late name, like a tombstone, to be suspended in evergreen by the retro-50’s bulbs and winking suns of blue, gold and red.

A pair of late-middle-aged men strummed holiday chord progressions on their amplified acoustic guitars, occasionally breaking into clarified carol themes. The newly-minted widowers who dressed for Christmas in their suits without help for the first time this year, sat lost and listened, hoping that their windsors looked something like those neat knots, sculpted by those arthritic lover fingers for decades, gone.

The ladies looked less out of sorts, most of them having taken the time and thought during the pre-arrangement days to prepare for the adjustments in attention, and household management, and the halving of the refrigerator, the table, the sofa and the bed.

Daughters, the new matriarchs, walked briskly, tearfully and certain, to the front where my friend met them, ornament in hand. They know, this year, that sadness has a taste: the magical days of winter lights have passed from the sparkle of champagne to the musky burn of port, heavy, purple, the grapes of heart.

Sons, who generally do not know these things, mostly stumbled, unconvinced by reality, interrupted by pathos, shocked by the hot and salt precipitation from their own blinking eyes.

The holidays will be difficult, we told them. This Nativity Season will be the first with an empty chair that is empty, for once, for real. The emptiness of the Elijah place setting is always a happy mystery: but the emptiness that accrues from absence sounds the echo of abandonment and doubt.

The Table of the Magi Star always bridges this year to the next. It is a diachronic nexus, the agora of ghosts and a festival of sentiments. This year, we told them, your sadness will recall every other grief: it is the secret, unavoidable track of Holiday, the conference of years, the path through the leaves that must be taken, and may not be traversed without risk and change.

There is no terror from the spirits, and the bitterness is sweet. Incompetent hands, now, brandish the carving knife and cannot make the gravy in the roasting pan. The laughter, too, is shy, experimental. And the trials lead, like drama, into reminiscence and story, narrating the old lesson of time: first there is fellowship, then there is remembrance, and the memory grows like an oak out of an acorn’s dream, and the eternal memory of God is sung through the soft murmur at the Table.

The First Star will not be found in the outside sky this year, we told them, but it is the single light in your window, to tell the world that life is still, in your heart this year, by this candle flame.

“They are at another Table tonight, this year, and we miss them, but for their felicity we are glad.”

Ah, yes, Christ: He came for these sad people, and for all meetings such as these.

He came for all who have had enough of the ornaments bittersweet, and who have spent too long at the confluence of ghost and nostalgia.

There is something about the winter lights that speak of forever, wistful, a something that wrings the heart like the chill of twilit snow, but glints of the fire hearth and brandy at midnight. There is something in the air at meetings of the sad and holidays, something that strips away all the Macy’s Parades, red fur hats and the clamoring society of tinsel.

There is something, with these funereal survivors, who arrive still on the midnight clear, who wait with the flocks by night.

They wait, hushed, with the lambs for the angels, for the handing out of salvific ornaments, bestowed from the Table of the Star.

I started my holidays with the sad people, and with them I found Christmas’ end.

Brother Our Way

We go, brother, our way into the wolves
As lambs with no purse, no bag, no sandals.
No shelters from contingencies, no bread from padded budgets,
No tunic of market surveys, no extra sandal for the dust,
No pretending that this is not difficult, that this is a career,
A romantic vision, a respectable thing, an admirable project:
Not a road to success.

We go, brother, our way through the shadows and curses,
Self-chosen perditions packaged by the therapy of sophistication
Of empty words and salutations, the delays and distances
Of ambiguities and conferences, workshops, and the winning
Of titles, badges, superlatives, expansions of the vitae.
There is to be limpid simplicity, like spring water:
Not the booze of congratulation.

We go, brother, our way in the warlands
And we look for open houses as the Son of Man has nowhere
To lay His head, to succeed with the crowds, to be elected,
To win. Ours is the journey of peace, not violence since we are called
To strive with self and the other selfish powers.
We say Peace through the door, and we stay,
Not, though, if it returns.

We go, brother, our way to find the sons of peace
Who will receive our old-fashioned preaching:
All have been called to the mystical festival, and
All have been compelled from the Law and the by-ways, but
All have not chosen Cross-comfort in the heart:
They wanted more than restoration of nature and perfection,
Not life but a shadow, rehearsal of shade.

We go, brother, our way with what is provided
In the perilous regions of contingency beyond all prediction:
We will find five loaves and two fishes, the Showbread and the Waybread,
We will drink from the Well of Bethlehem, the Dayspring and the Wine,
We will sing the Trinity and pray the Son at the hearth of the city:
The sons of peace there want the Gospel that may slay us:
Not the androgynous mantra of a lee shore.

We go, brother, our way to the sick who need physicians,
As exiled Samaritans, red-crossed, the wounded Inn-ward fetching.
In His Name we will heal them,
In His Name we will subject the nameless and drive them outward,
In His Name we will face them, and not camouflage them away from offense.
“The Kingdom of God is near you,” we will say to the dying,
Not death, for once. And the living will be glad.

We go our way, brother, through the land of unbelieving,
An overlay of shadows juxtaposed on a wide country green, gold and blue.
The land and its stories wait for our News,
The land and its dead long for Trinity, the Word and the Body,
The land and its present groan for Cross and the Day:
The Gospel explodes from our tongues, and the Eucharist burns in our hands:
Not the sinner’s prayer, but Baptism we portend.

We go, brother, two by two, into the city of universal calling,
Where few are chosen, as perdition is on sale these days and more are buying.
I am Orthodox because I’m American, rooted in the river hills,
I am Orthodox because I’m human, unnaturally bound to die.
I am Orthodox because we’re brothers, you and I,
And if they do not receive us, we will shake the sand, brother,
Not faith, for there is no other.

Weep Not at Nain

Cold and still and lifeless ill lying
On the bier. So strange to see the boy
Whose jest and winsome dreams once en-joyed
The heart of an old mother, now ill, crying.

The whole town and bridge club, beauty shop, baking crew and ladies’ guild
Were shocked at this injustice: how could God
Be cruel if He were so mighty: isn’t it odd
That goodness gets harder once youth is stilled.

They all came out to weep at the gates of Nain
With their widow friend, joyless, boyless, bereft
Of welfare, without food and clothing and shelter left:
But ask her, if you dare: she cares only for ancient pain.

Ancient pain at the city of Nain and everywhere:
For some, like this, the shame is especially clear
When the poor and the halt are more burdened with tears;
But death for the unburdened is more than even they can bear.

The Son of Man came to Nain for the pall-bearing
Of all the biers of man, every procession
He stills with the God-breath of compassion:
“Weep not,” Nain heard the Voice of the Ages, merely caring.

Young man from your coffin do quickly arise
And take your old mother dearly home.
Tell her you’re fine from the Master of Time, the Stone
Rolled away, He'll dry every tear from her eyes.

The abandoned municipal parks of poetry

Just pulled in the garage from my daughter's tutorial place. It's forty miles one-way, and gives us time to and from her science and math courses for us to do some academic work of our own.

Biographer's note: my wife and I homeschool our at-home daughter (the older one is at Malone). I was not happy with the religious views fomented by the state in the public school. Neither was I happy that "history" had been eclipsed by a chimera called "social studies," and English had become an enterprise for the promotion of adolescent self-expression, a thing I think should be suppressed.

Today, I drove (which is customary), and my 14-year-old read out loud (a practice I am recommending more often). We turned our attention to a little gem by John Hollander, entitled Rhyme's Reason. Pick it up at Amazon. You will not find it at the Monroeville Barnes and Noble.

My girl read this paragraph from the introduction:

Some day we will all be reading Blue Guides and Baedekers to what once were our own, familiar public places. In former times, the region of verse was like an inviting, safe municipal park, in which one could play and wander at will. Today, only a narrow border of that park is frequently used (and vandalized), out of fear that there is safety only in that crowded strip -- even as the users' grandparents would cling to walks that went by statues -- and out of ignorance of landscape. The beauties of the rest of that park are there, unexplored save by some scholars and often abandoned even by them.

Of course, I had to explain what Blue Guides and Baedekers were. I didn't have to explain the sense of the passage, though, as she understood already that she lives in a non-poetic age. Hollander first wrote this passage in 1981. I can only think that he would wonder, now, if even the strip were used.

I continue to believe, even more incorrigibly, that all real prayer is poetic, and all true poetry is prayer. Poetry is the spirit of language, the structure that makes the mind of man amenable to wisdom and to the cultural memory of beauty. The Trinity can only be sung about, never defined or proposed: the witness can only be carried in song (that is why Orthodoxy can never rest as propositional, only liturgical). Moreover, I believe that all deep poetry points, inexorably, to the Resurrection of the Son of Man.

Bury the Resurrection and there is no poetry. Kill poetry and the Resurrection won't be heard.

Forget poetry and songs will be forgotten, language will shrivel, and will become a technocratic matrix of information exchange.

Teach your children poetry. Forget memorizing for now, but go ahead and get Hollander's Committed to Memory. Return to the sound and magic of reading aloud words and phrases you don't even understand: revel, skip and rejoice in your ignorance -- reading hard poems is the best way to force yourself back into that childhood Our Lord recommends.

Throw away your NIV Psalms: read it in the original King James instead. Read Shakespeare aloud: don't just listen to it on CD in the car. Sing out loud your own melodies for Tolkien's songs when you read it to your wife at night: you will be amazed at how powerfully the words command the tune.

Amass seven hundred and ninety nine pennies, and purchase your own copy of Oscar Williams' Immortal Poems of the English Language. Get it here, or try your bad luck at a box store. In any case, it is a cheap paperback that can stand being stuffed in a glove compartment, shoved in a backpack, baptized in the sea, left out in the sun. It is predestined for doggyearedness.

Then, once you've received your Oscar in the mail (because your luck will have turned out to be bad), pack yourself a lunch: hard crusty palate-steadying bread you bake, still yeasty and weeping earth; a merlot you've decided all on your own, not from lists or highbrow recommendations, but from your own reveries; a cheese that should be, I've been told, unpasteurized; and a fruit in due season. No blanket (I sleep on these, and one cannot read and recline at the same time): find a sitting-stone instead and think for once, in the quiet. And pack your new book that needs to be beaten into oldness as soon as possible. The Orthodox people at the end of the world will be those who can walk in the woods with old shabby books.

Then, take and read. Out loud to the trees (don't be shy, they've heard it all before). Turn to page 458 and read Fr. Hopkins' Pied Beauty. Or page 101 for Herbert's Paradise. If you've the world and time enough, be Smart on page 195 with A Song to David. Read Auden and Eliot if you're in a darkling mood. Read Donne and Traherne if you're theological. Read Shakespeare if you want to learn English and study the subject that was slummed by Freud and actuarialized by everyone today. Read Dante if you want deep civilization and high romance. Explore the old sidewalks, venture into the arbors, set out, at night, into the wildlands of the old municipal park, if you're brave and English enough.

Take a little wine for your stomach and a glad heart, and a poem for your head. Human nature is on the run, and only poets remember it.

Prayerful poetry and poetic prayer (moreso than mythpoeia) are the best defense for whatever's looming next.

The easier dichotomies

Which is easier, to say “Your sins are forgiven you,” or to say, “Rise up and walk”?

Which is easier, to say “Peace be unto you,” or to say, “And with your spirit”?

Which is easier, to say “Forgive us our trespasses,” or to say, “As we forgive those who trespass against us”?

Which is easier, to forgive or to forget? Are you sure?

Which is easier, to enter the Temple, or to emerge back into the world?

Which is easier, to ask or to thank? To knock or to enter? To seek or to find?

Which is easier, to run from the Fish like a coward, or to run toward the Father like a fool?

Which is easier, to receive Communion, to give Communion, or to be in Communion?

Which is easier, to hold all things together, or to walk on water?

Which is easier, to say “Let there be light,” or to say, “Let him who is thirsty come”?

Which is easier, to make a man fearfully and wonderfully, or to bring that good work to completion?

Which is easier, to hear the heathen rage about god, supergod and superduper god and hope for their repentance, or to save me who knows better, but sins all the same?

Which is easier, to love the real atheist who doesn’t give a damn about truth and goodness, beauty and infinity, while he rehearses his next peccadilloes on couch and screen, or to dwell amongst us Trinitarians who exorcise the Holy Spirit from kitchens and boardrooms, chatrooms and mail lists, Saturday nights and crypto-cohabitations, hot dogs on Friday and curse words on Thursday, conniption fits at the spouse and kids, divorce and divorce and a house of steps, dissertations that applaud Weinberg and Dawkins and throw just enough jabs at those crazy fundies, magazine pieces that fawn over the newest outgassing from the industrial tower, big donations from agri-businesses and left-or-right of center foundations?

Which is easier, to say "Silver or gold have I none," or to say "Such as I have I give thee"?

Which is easier, to believe “Your sins are forgiven you,” or to get up when He says, “Rise up and walk”?

Which is easier, to pray or to breathe?

No middle name

She has no middle name,
but as she was born on Pentecost
Wasil and Eva named her
Rosalia, Rose for short.

As far as I know, she is nowhere
to be found in books of merit,
not even the search engines of cyberspace
can find her. Even her baptismal font
at Holy Trinity in a miners’ patch
has disappeared, along with the town.
They tried to find it, a decade back,
near the Ohio, near West Virginia,
but the tall grasses and insurmountable oaks
occluded discovery. Of course,

This is to be expected of a Rusin girl,
whose sotted father could have been noble,
if he hadn’t choked on dust and forgotten the sun …
a poet for a mother who could have written,
had she known the tongue and time enough.
Her mother loved the mining town,
the Ohio valley was close enough
in the geography of memory,
proximal to the Carpathian mountains:
She had an eye, and memory
for beauty. And that is why
Eva called her daughter Rose.

I pray for her, Rose, now stary baba,
now older than ever Eva was.

Eva took her family to the steel migration
and factories where Russki’s could do better
than blackened lungs, vodka-slaked,
Wasil could no longer take the sun,
and he was no longer.
So Rose and her sisters hired out
as goyyim, cleaning, lighting fires on the Sabbath,
hands accustomed to pirohi
now mixing shabbos koogle …

But then the War, and she really, really
ran the riveter, as the poster said.
The War ended, the party began,
and she danced in the evenings
and ran down to Havana and drove cross country,
still shy, but a country fizzed by victory
can make anyone gregarious for a while.

I pray for her, Rose, now crescent-like,
in Room 529, bound by telemetry wires,
IV lines, and nurses half her age,
who never knew hunger, wrath and want.

She met my father-in-law in her thirty-ninth year
and had her one and only in her fortieth.
They found each other, from both sides of the Tatras,
in a steel town, long from the War:
everyone else had taken up the GI Bill
and moved their digs into cute square houses,

but not Henry and Rose, ex-POW and shy daughter
of an illiterate poet who danced once near Castillo de la Punta.
They found each other, at last,
in time to bring another girl into the world.

I know this Rose only from the slides:
so many beach pictures of a little red head
and Rose, with a scarf and Hepburn shades,
the breeze from the surf mottling the lens
and echoing through the cooling fan of the lamp
the sonorous booms and streamful recessions
of waves on sand, and the Sun sounding the land.

I pray for her, Rose, now forgetful,
every familiarity wrenched from view and grasp,
now bathed in execrable fluorescence,
and her roommate’s penchant for All My Children
all freaking day,
but she says never a word, as she never did,
never a complaint nor murmur,
wondering, maybe, but never saying
why this was happening.

She slipped one day, and no one knew
she crushed a vertebrae,
and set her hip out of line
and somehow bacteria got in her spine,
we do not understand,
and never shall she.

But I pray for her, Rosalia, named
by Eve for Pentecost,
no middle name, no name for fame,
but named by a Trinity Who knows every sparrow.

I will take Rose, tomorrow
her old Chlib Duši, her battered book of prayer,
thumbed and smudged beyond repair,
you know, the kind that has English on the side
and Slavonic on the other.
It seems that when you’ve got dementia
and you were born Rusin
you begin to hear clearly the echoes
of Holy Trinity in a place
that the soul sets close to a home
for Rose, that she never had
but will. The Our Father never sounds so good
when you’re ill and lame,
until it’s said in the original Otce Naš:

For prayer is the original tongue,
in the land where Rose will finally get
her middle name.

Imagine

Imagine there’s a heaven
It’s not easy, but you should try
No whiteboards above us
To protect us from the sky
Imagine all the people
Living for the Way

Imagine no bioethics
It’s very hard to do
No mystifications and obfuscations
And no sociology too
Imagine all the Down babies
Allowed to breathe in peace

You may say that I’m a cleaver
Sometimes it seems I’m only one
I hope someday you’ll join up
Before the world sees the Son

Imagine no obsessions
I wonder, but I can’t
There’s greed, and so there’s hunger
A bestiary of man
Imagine salvation, not evolution
Restoring all the world

You may say that I’m a dreamer
It little matters if I’m the only one
I know someday we’ll meet up
When the world meets the Son

Leftover

I gave to God my leftovers
A mass on Saturday night, half an hour thank you,
between the ball games and morning tee's.

I gave to God my leftovers
A sentimental thought, a nostalgia from the glowy
Currier and Ives lithoprints of my past
(a little airbrushed, I know, but so very Hallmark),
church with the family,
sacraments from the old country,
Amen to all that
but no more:
couldn't stand the thought that I'd be called
a fundamentalist.

I gave to God my leftovers
a renovation of the New Testament
to make it a lot more appealing to the seekers,
the people who need liberated,
change the pronouns, level the leadership,
make the order nice and more, you know,
inclusive.

I gave to God my leftovers
'cuz I'm tired after all that TV
and its commands:
the Nephilim there, in nether space,
tell me, urge me,
to enroll my children in soccer and judo,
and spray their souls into the cyberious shadow
of lust and black flame.
tell me, they do, urge me
to watch, eagerly, with discipline
and iron rule, unwavering obeisance to dogma
as Simon Says on an Idol showing
in America.

(Swann, recherche but never knowing
du temps perdu,
is flying from the whiteness of the whale.)

I obey, without question,
the TV career
and I submit, neck bowed pale
as my head drops to slumber in chip dip and beer.

I gave to God my leftovers,
thank God He gave me His,
twelve baskets,
when only a crumb will do.

Found

In the grave with the body, in hell with the soul,
in Paradise with the thief.
The Good Shepherd,
in the storm of wrath,
the desert of death,
found what He was looking for.

The ninety-nine angels rejoice.
The widow dances with her lost coin.
The merchant wonders at the pearl.
The father embraces, festoons and rings His son.
The wheat kernel dies, the mustard seed blossoms,
and the oak reaches its arms to the stars.

Streams gush forth in the desert from the Rock,
the pierced side,
he that saw it bore witness and his testimony is true.

We were lost, shades in hades, the wilderness of wandering,
oddly named
("Sin", can you believe it?),
spirit-bound.

Today is the end of life-squandering,
the closure of shame:
Grace, can you receive it?
We were lost,
and now we're found.

Tonight

Tonight, I am not a theologian.
Nor an intellectual, nor a literatteur, nor a poet, a writer,
a commentator, a sophist.
When I see Him, passing by,
the Lamb,
I have nothing, nothing to say,
but weep softly, in the darkness,
in the rain and cold,
for this Friday and all Fridays,
where my soul and captive body have lain,
the arctic dark and redemptorist reach,
the severity where the Lamb was slain.

Art is dead tonight.
Thought has died.
My head aches,
whilst Jesus, my Personal Lord and Saviour,
weeps crucified.

Stavrophobia

I am afraid of the Cross
As a drunk is afraid of sober,
As a hypermodern dreads the sublime,
Fainting with fear and foreboding,
Premonizing what is mobilizing in the world,
For the powers of heaven will be shaken.

I am afraid of the Cross,
Tomorrow stands on the other side,
That is the Day that He has made.
Today, however, is a day I have familiarized
Down to gray:
A foretaste of Hades, a rehearsal of Hell,
A vocation in the vestibule,
Quotidian, lukewarm, but I know it well.

I am afraid of the Cross,
For the One Who plays with infinitude,
The One above all names,
Rides here, into my gray city, on an ass.
I believe, but not enough,
While the children and the stones hosanna,
My little knowledge has become a dangerous thing.
I am shot full of intellectual assents,
But I do not believe enough to work, to love,
To sense the pure,
To drive away the cynic, the sardonic,
The savant dilettante from my lips,
The arsonist that would rather curse
Than bless at the extremities of confession.

I am afraid of the Cross,
The impassive Godhead Who was acquainted with my grief,
Who co-inhered with the Second, the Son,
Whose Person is God, but Whose Nature is mine.
I did not think to be ingodded,
I merely thought I’d be let off the hook
With a get out of jail free card from Milton Bradley,
But instead,
The everlasting space, dreadful echoing, roaring loud brilliance
Groans in travail for more than parole,
Nothing less than revelation
Of theosis.
The stage is too bright, the crowd too loud,
The script too hard, the blocking too awkward,
Always calling, in italics, that I must decrease
As the Son that deceased, must rise
And increase.

I am afraid of the Cross,
For it means straight blindness at Damascus,
Pouring off my GQ colognes on proletariat podiatry,
Standing up to footnoted academics warming themselves by the fire
And staying true before the crowing at dawn,
Permitting my associates to pass me by up the corporate chart,
One on the right hand, the other on the left,
Reconfiguring my economics, to transmute a widow’s penny into gold,
The alchemy of the beatitudinal poor,
Lurching out of my slumber, after four whole days
Of practicing the ways of deathworks,
And, in harsh daylight, getting unwound.

I am afraid of the Cross,
Because I am afraid of death,
But not its approximation,
Which I have embraced.
I was born to die,
And have habituated myself to its fear.

That is why, Despota, when You stood at the door and knocked,
I was not answering.
And when You rode in, on donkey astrode,
I was not waving.
For I suspected that You had elected
To change my death into life,
Necrosis to theosis.

And for that I am afraid of the Cross.

Lord I believe, help Thou mine unbelief,
So I might carry this palm
From Sunday till Friday,
Until brightness converts all my gray.

Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutamus.
No, that’s a miss.
He is Jesus, not Julius, not that famous,
Better this:
Hail, Jesus, King of the Jews,
We who are born to die salute You.

Nowhere Where the Cross is Not

Wherever you look, you’d be hard pressed not to find a Cross.

Since Jesus came, every plus-sign, every perpendicular,
every intersection of vertical and horizontal is a sign you can’t get away from.

It’s the sign of Jesus, Son of God, Second Person of the Trinity,
and of what He did in the world, for the poor in spirit,
the marginal down and outers.
For the sick and broken.
For me. For you.

Wherever you look, go ahead, and try to find not the Cross:
it’s planted everywhere.
Every tree is a Cross now, since Jesus was hung on one.
Every building is a Cross, since of all the cornerstones He is the Chief.
Every intersection is a Cross, since all life is met in Him,
and in Him are all things held together.

Every tower, every aspiration, every refusal of sorrow, every hope launched out
into the unknowns of death and tomorrow:
these are all the Cross,
as the Son of Man was lifted up between earth and sky,
to violate the policies of the Prince of the Air.
To forever compromise the darkness,
and design in the night a flame undenied.

Wherever you look, go ahead, I dare you to try,
and beyond all the obvious plus-signs at Church and on your icons,
you find that Jesus’ sacrifice, the nails, the spear and death itself,
has got you surrounded.
His Eucharist, Body and Blood are writ large, incarnadine and valentine,
posted to all your inboxes, and in every wordless thought
between every unconscious breath.

Wherever you look in the Night, it’s there.
Jesus is now Lord of the Night as well as the Light:
the Son never goes down on the Cross of Christ.
The Cross is a mystical bonfire that brightens every darkness,
and it’s time that you see it wards off every shadow and haunting.

The bleak houses of spite radio their scripts,
and previews of bodiless terror leech into unconscious dreams,
like the nightmare of the fall that never stops and the ground is rushing up.

Look carefully, there’s the Cross.

The intellectual whispers murmuring that perhaps the Church is not right,
that perhaps it doesn’t matter,
and services are too long and the kids think it’s boring.

Look carefully, there’s the Cross.

The feeling of tiredness, and the thinking that you’ve tried and tried
and now what’s the use?
No joy, it seems, and life is a house once cleaned,
that gets messed up, dirty dishes and water rings, just an hour after.

Look carefully, there’s the Cross.

The inescapable knowledge, after forty-three, incessantly,
that what you thought you’d escape from which affected the rest of the race
you know is now coming for you,
and will come, the moment of fall, decease and dread.

Look carefully, there’s the Cross.

The Cross is there,
because Jesus and His Saints are there, and prayer is there,
and all has been seen before.

There is nothing you can experience that hasn’t been covered by His life,
the fellowship of the Redeemed, and the Sign of the Cross.
This life is answered, healed, only at the Tree of Life in the next:
so it is that the Sign of the Cross is the warding off of demons,
the dispelling of shadow,
and the open code passkey into Paradise.

Look carefully, there's the Cross.

Wherever you look in the Day, it’s there.
The schoolfriend whose makeover covers the tears in the night,
and whose cruelties and chatter were learned
in too many car rides, and too many shows at prime time.

Look carefully, there’s the Cross.

The child that no one understands but you,
but the child who is nice to everyone else but you,
and the child who trusts no one else with their very worst but you,
is a child you love but are afraid you don’t.

Look carefully, there’s the Cross.

The friend who’s drunk and disappoints,
who you wish would clean up his act and get some help,
but he’s done that fifty times already
and so he doesn’t want to change, now he’s hungry and a mess.

Look carefully, there’s the Cross.

The boss who's forgotten every labor advance,
or the former colleagues who are gathering up a paper trail on you,
or the schedule that has no notion of Sunday
and only a hope for a penthouse and cruises
until the end in an urn, in some marble corner.

Look carefully, there's the Cross.

The parent who won’t trade roles with you,
but who, sometimes, acts like a child, lost, needy, lonely, and wounded,
but too much aware that they’re a mom or dad of an adult
so God forbid they’ll say I need you, please help, I’ll trust you today.

Look carefully, there’s the Cross.

The spouse who isn’t your spouse any longer,
or just doesn’t seem to be:
your house has drifted, and the interstitial space has extended, dulled,
and he/she has receded from you
as the space of your home has grown
from that charming little apartment where you were touchingly dirt poor
into a large sterile residence where space, no longer close, can creep so cold.

Look carefully, there’s the Cross.

The Cross is there, because prayer is there and you are there,
and you see the Cross, only because you see yourself no longer.
Your world doesn’t end at your feelings anymore.
It doesn’t matter to you anymore how you are treated,
how you are dealt with, how much respect you get,
how you are looked at, talked to, noticed or acknowledged,
or who bows to you along the way.

In loving Christ, you are paroled from self
and you can then and only then look with His love toward the other,
and you bring the Cross
to the poor, the lost, the lamb and lost coin, the pearl of great price,
the orphan, the widow, the man left bruised along the way.

You, as you denied yourself and followed Christ,
bore the Cross in your soul,
and as your soul was no longer stuffed with self, it grew up,
Christlike,
and proclaimed Christ crucified.

Who was poured forth for the Life of the World.

Which is exactly what your schoolfriend, your boss, your drunk friend,
your child, your parent, your spouse, your friend …
exactly what was needed …
the One Thing needful.

The Cross is everywhere,
but there was a cold soul season, once, when it was nowhere.

Today, there is nowhere where the Cross is not.

Your Cross we adore, O Master,
And Your Holy Resurrection we glorify.

What if it's true?

What if the old superstitions turned out true,
and in all the billions and billions of Sagan’s Cosmos
there was only one insignificant spot,
off one of the spokes in one of the twirling spirals
spinning out to black?

And on that spot was the only place,
the only moment where life occurred
(however you define life),
and no where else.

Then there will be no voices from the heavens
(well, ahem, save one):
SETI just static, nothing else, not ever,
and no green men or even green slime,
no where else.

What if this is it? What if we’re it?
What if that’s all He wrote?

Be not afraid:
such deafening isolation, such mute singularity
would not by itself prove the existence of God.

But would it refute evolution’s real proposition?
-- which is, it must be admitted,
that God must not exist …
Maybe, maybe not, but it’d be a major blow.

The possibility of life in other places
is not that troubling to old-fashioned religionists.

True, the even more rarefied possibility of sentient life is a more difficult problem to settle,
but it would not be a bonecrushing fact,
as would be, to belief, an irrefutable evidence
of trans-species mutation into another kind, another name.

The reverse, you should note, is not true:
where extra-terrestrial life is no great hazard to religion on one hand,
on the other, a complete absence of green men wrecks the metaphysic of evolution,
the statistical, probability model of ontology.

I mean, look at it this way:
if life happens on its own, if it’s inevitable,
then it should happen everywhere, on its own, inevitable.
There really should be carbon-based life forms in a zillion places,
even silicon-based, or whatever.
And by rights, if the Universe is as big and as large,
and if progress is as uniformly benevolent as thought,
then, one should trust, and really believe, without doubting,
that somewhere, somehow, out there in the big big blackness
there’s someone else calling out,
“You’re right, you know,
we’ve all evolved.
Don’t worry, the coast is clear,
there is no God.
We’ve checked, it’s okay.”

The sheer prospect of such happy news,
of Vulcans steaming in their ship to make logical contact,
is reason enough to sink millions and billions
into large arrays and linked processors, SETI and colliders,
listening, looking, into the static of black.

But all this is not important –
what we think and how we are conscious
is not meaningful at all
if the evolutionary proposition is vindicated.

What does anything matter, then,
if awareness turns out to be not the attention of the soul
but a physiological epiphenomenon emitted, secreted
from a throbbing neural web?

Or, to be less polite,
if, against all polling trends and PowerPoint bullets at anti-ID conferences,
God annoys everyone by existing …
or worse, He is even the He that is witnessed by the Church
as Triune and Personal,
then evolutionary dogma matters
only insofar
that it aided and abetted willful ignorance,
damnation.

"What if" is important only if it might be true.

I know, it’s so unusual and outré,
outmoded and dishabille:
but be brave and try this on.
Life is only here, in the Earth of Six Days,
and in the Garden, at the center,
Paradise grew where the prayer of Man
interpenetrated matter with the Glory of Praise.
Mountains were to be moved, then,
routinely, by the children of God,
and life was to flower from its nursery on Earth,
and green, like Spring,
the Universe
for the ages.

What if?
I’ve heard nothing, seen nothing yet
to dismiss such a notion.
Have you?

Ingrates Anonymous

Ingrates Anonymous

Hello, my name is Jonathan, and I’m an ingrate. Here’s why.

He opened my eyes, and I said the light made me squint.

He blew breath in my lungs, and I reflected, authentically, on the anxiety of existence.

He molded me from the elements, and I disagreed with His atomic model.

He set me in a singular situation, with the Sun and the Moon the same apparent size,
The right temperature, atmosphere, abundance of water and trace minerals,
And I said that life was inevitable, automatic, on a predictably large number of planets,
Opting for Star Trek over the Gospel, of course.

He fashioned me in His Image, and set me onward to His Likeness,
And I believed, rather, that I emerged inexorably from apehood.

He surrounded me with food, clothing and shelter,
Richer that ninety percent of the population,
And I turned up my nose at Brussels sprouts.

He painted my horizon with attraction,
Verdant hills, mountains of porphyry, cumulus comical and majestical
And sun, rising and setting, the beginning of beauty,
But I preferred TV and deconstruction.

He produced my play, and staged me with a cast of better actors
Whose words were symbols, and blocking was a poem,
Love stood at the center of their choreography, piping and lamenting,
But I refused to dance, I chose not to mourn.

There is one He sculpted in loveliness,
A friend best and the image of charity, fellow heart,
And I would not get her a glass of water,
I would not take out the trash.

I had one chance with the family of dreams,
A woman of splendor and daughters of loveliness:
But I fear I will regret my present,
Looking at what was, but what is not,
What might be, but not what is.

Rebuffed and unrequited,
He still sent His Son to the Vineyard where I was,
Unrepentantly holding on to the wine
Of ingratitude.

Surely, he will listen to My Son, He said:
But I said, This is the Heir.

He walked, despite, from Bethlehem
A few days away on the Road of dust and thorns
To the brow of the Skull.

There, the Infant took my Ingratitude
And transmuted it into proper, natural thanks.

Thank God
For the Resurrection,
That I may make amends.

Amen.

A Christmas Wish

O Holy Father,
I approach Thee humbly, on bended knee.
For I recognize Thee as the Maker of the heavens and the earth.

Light flashed from Thy Word of Creation,
and by Thy command were separated the skies and the rain,
The seas and the shores, the forests and fields,
and filling them in abundance were
the creatures in flight, and the animals great and small.

Thou didst set our Parents in the Garden,
In a Paradise of green leaf and fruitfulness,
to be steward over all Creation,
and to proclaim in thanksgiving all things unto Thee.

This was Eden, and our parents rejected it.

And with every sin, in thought, word or deed,
so did I.

At the time of the Fall,
Thou didst set the Archangel with the flaming sword
whirling at the Gate of Paradise
so that humanity, in its corrupted nature, could not return.

From that moment, beginning with our parents Adam and Eve,
we learned to pray, “Lord have mercy.”

Over the ages, Thou didst hear our prayer
and Thou didst hearken unto our cry.

In the fullness of Time,
in the middle of the dark night of our souls,
Thou didst send the Ancient of Days,
the Son of God, the Son of Man,
Thine Everlasting Son Jesus Christ
to be born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,
to lay in a Stable Manger,
adored by the Beasts who bowed to their King,
to be worshiped by Shepherds and Wise Men,
and to lead humanity back home to Paradise.

O Holy Father,
the flaming sword no longer bars the Gate to Eden.
Thy Son, the Child Christ,
Didst walk from the Manger to Calvary’s Tree.
And by the Glory of the Empty Tomb,
the Fire of Resurrection overshadowed the Fiery Sword,
And by that severe mercy Thou didst make a way for me.

I adore Thy Son, my beloved Newborn Christ,
My Loving Crucified Saviour and Risen Lord.

And by His Name do Thou call me,
From this day forward,
Ever closer to Thy everlasting Home.

Amen.

Something for Nestorius

Rock a bye, Baby God

Rock a bye, baby God, in the Manger laid
Dark is the night, noon is the light,
When the Son obeyed.

Soft is the lullaby of the pious Girl,
Peace is her wonder, joy is her splendor,
She whispers to the world.

An elder man is burdened to guard this cosmic birth:
Royal is the keep, as this carpenter guards the sleep,
The Word has left heaven for earth.

This Manger is the center, the jewel of space and time,
Infant and Lord, Dove White and Sword,
Christ renders mankind for deep rhyme.

His is the Life where Wish and Completion
Are crafted by a Word, delay never occurred,
Second Adam to our tragic depletion.

Red Ox and Ass kneel beastly in praise:
Animal meditation, Edenic contemplation,
They, if none else, saw the Ancient of Days.

Shepherds and Magi arrive and adore,
With mystic philosophy and pastoral simplicity:
The greater gifts later toward home they bore:

Gifts of light gleaming for gold and myrrh,
An exchange of love from Heaven above
Frankincense for prayer strong and pure.

Rock a bye, baby God, in the Manger laid
You are not afright of that later Friday night,
When on Calvary Tree You stayed.

The spheres are bejeweled with diamonds ablaze,
But One is the fire that turned midnight to Day.

What the Trinity can Do

In A Bath Teashop
by John Betjeman

“Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another—
Let us hold hands and look.”
She such a very ordinary little woman;
He such a thumping crook;
But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels
In the teashop’s ingle-nook.

Dear Mary and Joe

Dear Mary and Joe:

Mary, the phone’s ringing. Let it go.
And Joe, don’t delete this message.
For twenty years, I’ve known you both for an age.
I will never think of you less than a friend:
But my time as your repairman is at an end.

No more therapy for you.
We practiced I-messages and sharing, too.
We’ve done anger management and foam sticks
And spent thousands of dollars for a weekly fix.
Managed care and the well-meaning Judge have a song:
They say, and they’ll pay, for treatment to go on and on.

Anymore, it’s not Christian.
They want me to sign off as a psycho-sociologian.
But worse, you want me to arbitrate
And every session we start with positions to state:
“I wanted her badly last Friday night,
But she went off mad and started a fight.

I have my needs.”
“But just before, I asked for water please,
He turned over and snorted, too busy to care.
The nothing he got later on was just fair.”
And this after years of Minuchin, Satir and sculpture:
Haley’s system and Smalley come down to blank closure.

I won’t be your professional.
What you need, unfair friends, is a confessional:
I confess, you listen, we’re not “sharing” anymore.
There’s one reality, one moment opening the Door.
There is a Person to commune with, Infinite and Bright.
An order of meanings, and Mount Tabor’s energetic Light.

Here, Mary and Joe, repent:
Ride the Ass you’ve become, get to Bethlehem and relent.
Give up your needs, and make like Joseph the older:
A gaffer he was, but a prime foster soldier.
And the Holy Virgin, “be it unto me,” she said,
To the Angels, to Love, she inclined her sweet head.

Give up your needs,
Joe, you’re called to more than prurient deeds.
Marriage does not demand concupiscience:
The sheetly games don’t deserve such importance.
It is better to practice the language of forever
With a cool glass in small hours, and bless her.

You want, Mary, to be bitter.
It was otherwise when you were young and fitter.
You bounced back, for Joe, with charming grace,
And you could hide disappointment from your face.
But too much water’s gone down under that bridge,
And filled the blue bottles rowed up in the fridge.

You both have your diversions
To anesthetize the rigor of marital reversion.
The undisciplined mob is triangulated
Mainly from a faith’s that’s been strangulated.
You come home every night to a fight in the blight:
You’re so depressed, you say, when the response should be fright.

You have both embraced Hades,
The Images of God have quit Likeness and are shades
Too soon before death: passion, bitterness and lust
Have enervated soul, your mind desiccated to crust.
Answer the phone, Mary, and the pool boy will take you.
Clink the link, Joe, and the airbrushed golem will break you.

Mary and Joe,
To Bethlehem you should go.
Submit Mary, and with maternity fill your hour
For that is the grace of Eve, your primary power.
And Joe, please grow up and get a deep chest.
Lead by losing yourself, and learn how to bless.

The Trinity is your only eternity,
And Infinite Personhood is your last reality.

Personhood
Is perfected in complete self-abandonment.
Personhood is eternal, and must seek atonement.
Time is in your hand, as you ride on your way.
You choose whether you enter the Day
You choose whether in Hades you stay,
Whether your children be there, or finally at play.

Which they, and you, should
for the admission price of adoration of
the Child Christ,
Whose Manger and Cross, in time,
are the same wood.

Sincerely yours,
for I am not mine.

And another thing and something else

And another thing.

When we forgive and bless our enemies
They are, by definition, no longer our enemies.
That is how we get to know
He is not my enemy
In the first place.

And something else.

One of the oddest quirks of English
is that the first half of meon
is me.

He is not my enemy

He is not my enemy.
He might be Muslim,
He might be Materialist,
He might be Anti-Traditional,
He might oppose every classic institution,
Every old convention, every decent romance,
Every agrarian habit and loamy truth,
Every custom and chivalry, every hierarchy and style.
He might be a Revolutionary,
A Liberal, a Deconstructionist, a Post-Modern,
A Neo-Darwinistic Evolutionist who has Marx on the head,
Who kills off Homer in the morning and by evening
Does the Wellhausen on Shakespeare,
Who neither eats meat, wears fur, burns oil,
But didn’t know that Swift’s proposal was sposed to be a joke.
He might be an Abortionist.
But he is not my enemy.

Pol Pot was not my enemy,
Neither was Stalin, Hitler, Hirohito,
Mehmet, Suleiman, the Khmer Rouge,
Ian Paisley, Cardinal Humbert,
Marquis du Sade, Robespierre,
Quisling, Benedict Arnold,
Not even Hugh Hefner,
Bob Guccione,
Larry Flynt.
Not Dawkins or Dennett or even
That guy at Princeton
(What’s his name? Does it matter?).

I have no right to say these things
For I have never been really hurt.
I’ve been through upsets and disappointments,
Witnessed a few tragedies from a distance.
But I’ve not wandered on the heath, in the storm.
I’ve not been forced, by events, to rail at the sky.

So all this hippy, yippy peace and love
“He is not my enemy” stuff
Could be just stuff
Until I’m faced with a real enemy
Up close and personal,
Face to face, sword to sword.

But even so.

I understand them all.
We run around naked in the same nature.
Breathe the same air.
Beat the same drums of thought, feeling and hunger.
Dance the same passion.

I understand the urge not to believe,
I understand the urge to hate the other,
I understand the urge to take, to luxuriate,
To obfuscate the facts,
To stop thinking when it’s hard.

And because I understand him,
He cannot be my enemy.

Good heavens, if I understand pride and anger aright,
Even the Devil
Cannot be my enemy.

That
Is sin and death.
And these
Are not things.

That
Is my enemy,
And it is not a he,
Not even an
it.

Christ is my Saviour
Only when he is not my enemy,
Only when my enemy is what is not even
it.

What an Orthodox Christian looks like

His hair is not so long
And his garments are somewhat stylish,
Not remarkable.

His house is simple
And his social calendar is not stellar,
Not extraordinary.

His asceticism is secret
And his prayers are not advertised on his sleeve,
Not promoted.

His politics are not organized
And he has a quiver full of single issues,
Not party-minded.

His philosophy is overthrown by theology
And his best thoughts are for the Trinity,
Not modern or fundamental.

His college failed him, where Christendom's forgotten,
And he reads now, auto-didactically,
Not au courant.

His wife is pretty, and she forbears him,
And they’ve learned to look forever,
Not at Cosmo.

His daughters are pretty, and they tolerantly obey him,
And are set, in comedy, for nuptial glory,
Not for irony.

His philosophy is meant for prayer and breath,
And he yearns for the healing of soul and earth,
Not revolution.

His aesthetics are Christian, and thus not Derridean,
And he savors the fields, primavera, and the gift of Irene,
Not a champion for Duchamp.

His obedience is to patriarchs,
And though history has oft disappointed,
Not despaired of truth,
Not remarkable:
Blessed are the meek,
For they shall inherit the earth.

Off to see the wizard

I was off to see the Wizard,
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
I wanted the heart of the Tin Man,
The Straw Man’s brains and the guts of the Lion,
The pep of Toto and Dorothy’s home.
They’d all been misplaced by tornados,
Rain, flying monkeys, lions, tigers and bears,
And the green hands of the Witch.

Fell asleep in the poppy field,
As one might expect
And dreamt of inclusive worlds in a magnetic web,
And de Man chasing Hegel.

But poppies are not good science,
So I met the whitecoated man behind the curtain
Who said, to be improved,
I must first fight inequality, ignorance, phobic old-fashioned-ness.

It was tough, but I got the broomstick after all
From the coots in the old world.
The Wizard said, “That’s nice,”
Whereupon he told me that the answer to my problem
Was that there was no heart to miss,
No brains and guts to worry about,
That pep is overrated
And what’s a home?

So I left the white-jacket, sullen,
And looked for Lena Horne instead.
She sang me a stirring number
That made me clap and jump.
But after the curtain,
I remembered her advice,
“Believe in yourself, right from the start
You'll have brains
You'll have a heart
You'll have courage
To last your whole life through.”

I left the show, the Wonderful World of Oz.
The Wiz had science,
Glinda the lore of purple dinosaurs.
But I remained heartless, mindless,
Gutless, pepless,
And very aware
Of a certain lack of home.

Where to now?
Certainly not the Church:
The broad yellow-brick-road certainly does not
Lead there.

Shoot Me

The oldest girl, in the white clapboard schoolhouse, said
"shoot me, just let the others go."
Charles Carl Roberts the Fourth did so,
but shot the other little girls, like my daughters, anyways.
And then himself.
The red lights flashed through the night,
as more little girls expired,
under the flourescent clinical sophistication eschewed by their fathers.

Their hearts slowed, bearing away the hot sun on the curried grass,
the timothy waving on the Lancaster downs,
the minnows caught in the cold silver, free for the taking,
and the ubiquitous Amish trampolines purchased from WalMart.
These, too, evaporated,
uncontained by the light bulbs, the diodes
and many petroleum products of English manufacture.

Little Amish girls, Anabaptist pacifists who had that day
run laughing along the unkempt fence rows.

"Shoot me," the oldest freckled one said,
who might have squeezed milk from the Holstein teat that day at 4:30 am,
and shoveled the steaming sileage into the trough,
or slopped the sow and laughed at the barbarian piglets,
or spiraled hard corn in an Amish pirouette, skittering the chickens
(serves them right, ill-mooded peevish hens
who are all opinion but no thought):

she walked to school today,
passed by her sister and friends on the run,
she needed more time to think, starting to think,
about the beardless, red-faced strawhatted taciturn
wide-cheekboned blue-eyed Jacob,
and goosefleshed chills raced down her spine, smiling in blush.

"Shoot me ... let the others go free,"
said she to the milk man gone mad.

He did, along with the others,
having sent Jacob and the teachers and the boys outside first,
so it would just be Charles Carl Roberts the Fourth and the girls,
who would all die for the sake of an unsettled feeling
in stupidity,
bad catechism.

Shoot me.
He did.

The Amish, saved thank God from the press of the Press
and those garish lights of television Jakob Amman warned us about,
prayed to God
in the house by the dead.
They sang an hymn, and left for Gethsemane.

Today,
just four miles from the white clapboard school,
where the demons had their way,
in a Methodist field of green,
they lay him down Charles Carl Roberts the Fourth.

His wife was there, and his children,
and about seventy five mourned him.

Of
these,
thirty three
were
Amish.

So for all you Christians who are mad about missing funds,
and look to tar and feather ...

for all you Christians who look for others to repent,
and want self-flagellation and contrition
and want them to show they're really sorry ...

for all you Christians who can't forgive and forget
because truth be told you just love to remember,
who entertain yourselves with the thought of sinners worse than you
so you have someone to be better than ...

for all you Christians who read mail lists
and cannot wait for the newest data
to come out of audits and prosecutions, and committee meetings ...
who make anonymous calls and write anonymous letters
and circulate internet opinions on forums and crankly web sites ...

First of all, I'd like you to slow down a bit
because I'm one of those who take care of the sinners
God is chastising through your good offices.

I'm tired, and I've run out of bandages and salve.

Take a break from your lashing,
it must be hot sweaty work.
Aren't you tired, too?

Walk out to the field,
and watch the thirty three.
Amish.

The fathers,
mothers,
and brothers.

Of the little girls.

Of the sister,
Anabaptist, pacifist,
who would never kiss Jacob,
who said,
"Shoot me,"
so that others might live.

The other girls didn't live.

But I did.

And so did you.

My marriage is silver

My marriage is silver as the locks on my brow, but she is the smile that gleamed on the frond of cherry blossoms I plucked for her, a thousand years of naiveté past, but mere yesterday in a prayer.

My marriage is silver as the bells and tinsel, but she is the form and substance, heart and flesh secret forged, the woman and bride I claimed cycles and fashions ago, but embrace today as mystery and fair.

My marriage is silver as the sun on gray seas, but she is the white petal rain on a breeze in May, and her eyes and fingers course through the lilies as Oberon’s courtiers, ageless, but new as dawn and spring air.

My marriage is silver as the glass of image and time, but she is the sculpture of rose and taffeta and fragrance of flower, sky and moon, who reflects without reversal, with glory exceeding all I bear.

My marriage is silver as the river, gleaming under the fullness and the stars, at the nightwatch before Aurora, with the wind bearing echoes of Hyperborean shores, but she is song and whisper of this heart’s care.

My marriage is silver and I am older, but she is the spring of a young man’s fancy, the well of troth and desire, and love’s labors in season and beyond with her are able, and efficacious, to surmount every stair.

Singularity: one story, one place, one baptism

A few meaningful lines from Donne:

We think that Paradise and Calvary,
  Christ's cross, and Adam's tree, stood in one place;
Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;
  As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face,
  May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace.

So, in his purple wrapped receive me Lord,
  By these his thorns give me his other crown;
And as to others' souls I preached thy word,
  Be this my text, my sermon to mine own,
  Therefore that he may raise the Lord throws down.

From Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness.

Another pleasantry from surprising quarters (and odd)

From Ballad of the Goodly Fere:

A son of God was the Goodly Fere
That bade us his brothers be.
I ha' seen him cow a thousand men.
I have seen him upon the tree.

He cried no cry when they drave the nails
And the blood gushed hot and free,
The hounds of the crimson sky gave tongue
But never a cry cried he.

I ha' seen him cow a thousand men
On the hills o' Galilee,
They whined as he walked out calm between,
Wi' his eyes like the grey o' the sea,

Like the sea that brooks no voyaging
With the winds unleashed and free,
Like the sea that he cowed at Genseret
Wi' twey words spoke' suddently.

A master of men was the Goodly Fere,
A mate of the wind and sea,
If they think they ha' slain our Goodly Fere
They are fools eternally.

I ha' seen him eat o' the honey-comb
Sin' they nailed him to the tree.

From none other than Ezra Pound, quoting Simon Zelotes, [who] speaketh it somewhile after the Crucifixion.

Red in the Morning

It’s hot, and the Holy Land burns. There is no wine in Qana of Galilee.

Gas trickles down the esophagus of my car, at $3 a jug: my poverty enriches the nouveau riche (and tres gauche) who are perched, Sultan-like with quivering jowls, atop a landfill of cash.

Is it wrong? Is it right? Is it conservative? Is it neo-con blight?

It’s hot, and the parched chaparral blazes. There is no balm in Jal’ad.

The Caribbean is diseased with a hundred degrees: the storms will rise as Leviathan tremens, Poseidon raging with Alecto.

Is it warming? Is it left? Is it liberal? Is it spinning deft?

It’s hot, and there is red in the morning. There are fewer Christians in al-Jaleel.

Meanwhile, on Monongahela, eight ladies are priestified on the Good Ship Lollipop, vestals of the new consciousness.

Is it enough for the signs of the times, this adjusted, inclusive, multi-cultural, sensitive, emasculated religion of the times?

Is it straight?

Is it true?

Is it faith?

Red in the morning:
Sailor -- take warning.

You know you are getting old ...

You know you are getting older, when …

… it is getting harder to count apples but easier to remember them on a tree

… our side of trespasses easily surpasses the debt of others

… childhood friends become understandable again, moreso than the adult ones

… all the good judges of character have disappeared

… and a lot of mottos, aphorisms and affidavits have become obsolete

… it is understood that friendships come and (mostly) go in the modern world

... euphemisms are confused with their antecedents, and become ineluctable

… "intellectual" and "scholar" are not things to be grasped (but are anyways)

… good old books, once set down in the green years, make sense now

… poetry not only makes sense, but becomes necessary

… it becomes less possible to put off the choice between good and evil

... or between good or evil (hot or cold), and merely stultified, dull

… the other side of appearances begins to appear

… stuff like elaboration, rhythm and distance are treasured

... vision demands, from phenomena, the symbolism of participation or the aspect of brittle shell

… irony no longer entertains

… romance becomes untrustworthy

… tragedy is finally appreciated

… and comedy is known to be a harder thing

… and Christianity is true, exclusively, mainly because of that

On the way to Good Friday

On the way to Good Friday
I was distracted by more important things
Hollywood flinging its annual diatribes against Golgotha
Church politicians launching their scripted putsches in beer halls
Gnostics and agnostics both flocking to Jerusalem
Demons arriving in legion, in Versace,
It is understood that this
is Friday's way.

The Son of Man has set His face like flint
toward that midnight noon on the crown of the skull
I, though, have set my mind to a softer sort,
duller, not so sharp and unyielding
much more amenable to the times
I mean in such a nominalistic age
those old opinions of hard realities just have to go
you know
things like the Cross.

The Big House of God

The house of God is built by hands and walked by feet,
Voices echo from the walls
Scents of incense, yes, to be sure, but also loam and water,
And fumes from passing trucks.

There is, certainly, the higher vision
And intimations of thousands and tens of thousands
And myriads, adoring the Ineffable.
But there, too, are the lower visions
Of the less exalted and more likely:
One thinks of basement bazaars,
The other of baseball and bingo.
The other of the hardness of pews,
Whether they should be padded or removed,
And when to stand or kneel or cross oneself and when.
"That sermon is so very long, you know"
And that AC or lack thereof makes it hot or cold, never the mean.

Funny, isn’t it,
How we are sure that God is not so self-conscious,
Not stricken with so many ideas of reference,
He waits and is adored, and will be adored
By the beasts of the field and the birds of the air,
By the forested hills, and the murmur of shores and streams and rustling leaves
And rocks, of course
Who are not hard-witted as you or I.

This house, divine as churches are,
But human as houses are, and apartments, and trailers, and tents, and cells,
And the occasional refrigerator box.

This house, this House of God,
Is a blend of splendor and profane.
The Light of Tabor rains and rains,
Drenching us once with ecstasy, twice with sorrow,
Thrice with the dogma of joy.
The light of Christ shines for all,
Even in incandescence, perhaps in fluorescence,
But it shines in and through our candle flame,
Small flicker, little gleam,
The Uncreated fires the soul.

So vast it is, but it is so close,
Like infinite distance folded back, Mobius-like,
Where the story unfolds completely new,
But faintly, charmingly, ethnically familiar.

We are exalted, we are humbled,
We are joyous, we are mournful,
We are terrified, we are comforted,
We are delighted children, we are old and wise.
We pinch pirohi, we ingest the Eucharist,
We fume with kapusta and kolbasi, we breathe the censing of myrrh,
We purchase raffles and swill the seasonal pivot,
But we know our Nicene Creed,
We believe that memory is eternal and more than nostalgia,
And we are not offended by the strong possibility
That paradise will be redolent of church on a Sunday,
Heaven of every love.

Funny, isn’t it,
That such a thought, of eternal familiarity, might repel?
I knew a man, once, who wished that he would not recognize
His wife in paradise.
It so appeared that he prayed for discontinuity
Of this life from the next.

Ah, perpetuity, how we wish it,
How we fear it,
How we despair of it.
Because the truth is
That every jump from one dimension into the next
Is an infinite expansion:
Distances are greater in the fourth dimension,
Time is longer in the fifth:
The squaring of the line simply allowed
For an infinity of diagonals:
Who can tell what there is in space?
Who can blame a man for fearing Heaven
Where we will see, and be seen, face to face?

Better rehearse in church and taste immortality first,
And see if you like it.
You might, you might not.
The House of God is built by God:
The church, the soul, and all the universe:
For some, it’s way too large.

Cousin, It's Soul Saturday

Cousin, I miss you
How long has it been,
And how many commemorations have I chanted your name?

Not a few, by now,
But today, Soul Saturday,
Your name came out hard
Finally.

The other times were easy, too easy.
But not today.

Were you there, cousin, in the pews
Or wandering about the ceiling,
Looking down at the icons and the incense?

Wandering would have been so like you,
And just being there, so religious, would have been so not.

Cousin, I was angry before and after that sullen night:
You spattered darkness in your pendular gaze,
Turning at the end as you turned for years,
Never able, in your evanescent and lurid burlesque
To