Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Prayer, August 17

Help me really come before You, Son of God.
Me with my dirty fingers, scattered mind, polluted intentions.
Sift through all this with me. I can't do everything. I certainly can't
do everything right now. But I know You want me to come to You
with everything. To submit to Your will.

I was reminded this week that harmony with You is the only beauty.
It is not some oddball, screech-to-a-stop-at-life, stunted attempt.
It is tapping into the sap, the lifeblood of the universe. It is drinking deep
each moment with a prayer of praise,
whether dressed in heavy skirts or naked in water.
It is allowing emotion, obeying honor, choosing love.


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Saturday, August 16, 2014

Letter, August 1

I wonder what you are doing today. Isn't each day rather miraculous?
Does it ever make you weak in the knees?
I'm not really sure what all this means, gym class and magazines and marriage...
what can be let go, and what is irreducible?
What is love when you don't feel it, and you just chug obediently
along the track because it's there?
Maybe you are tired of me asking questions. I'm not sure of myself sometimes...
am I actually steady? I seem pretty flighty, to me. I hop up in the middle
of writing you to answer my phone, take pressed flowers out
from between books.
They are delphiniums. I quite like them. It's relieving to find flowers I like;
lately I've been wondering if I like flowers very much at all.
They seem rather illusory and taunting, like the smell of a neighbor's BBQ.

We can't do justice to any of this.
Sometimes I forget to try anyway.
Will you really find me extraordinary and delicious? Will I find you so?
Or will we spend years resolving to make peace with a fluctuating image,
misaligned printing - the cyan, magenta, and yellow bleeding off the edges
where they shouldn't?
Will I be as boorish and perverse with you as I am with myself?
Will you teach me gentleness and manners?
Lord God, help me to be honest. To laugh and mean it.
I'm tired. I've been well fed, and I'm hungry for hunger. Want a little more of the unavoidable acquiescence of fasting.
Jesus, we call on You under our breath, and with our eyes open,
and with fingers on skin. Come, bridegroom.

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Sunday, August 10, 2014

Iraq (every pair of eyes is overwhelming)


Nazarene
you're calling me
until you can 
see my cheekbones
you can see, you can see my
neck bones
none of this oh, oh,
none of this is OK, 
no

every drop from your mouth, every drop
let me catch it on my tongue
this milk my very marrow, many many times before I tried to chew up
more than I could bite or swallow
kissed the bark until the leaves dropped off 
your face's planes, your plain face something pure 
if not eternal, what? wipe out the bowl, that grin off your face,
that levity around water
are you crisping up by the heater? or grown warm?
you man-of-war,
you're boring holes, I can't hold this, 
I can't hold on, O mother, 
Daddy, lift me down 
I climbed so high 
I couldn't see the ground
and every pair of eyes 
is overwhelming.

Supermoon

Swing low, swing high
whistle, howl, hoot beside
me at the full moon with your chains flying,
brother, laughing helplessly and too loud to be
reasonable. Was creation ever
meant to be taken indifferently,
of habit? A tooth-flossing duty, or a cough
and a gasp like vodka?
Far be it from me
(it is ever so close),
to blink at heaven
scooping down and whipping up
our heels, our hair, our hearts in hallelujah.


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