Orvieto I

In Your Passion You embraced us:

What pain to know

That I cannot be crucified

With arms folded.

I.

We do not exist until we give. And so,

I knew I

was

when

I played the old tunes

of my bedroom and the woods,

in the stirring air of the

Terrazza.

Your love blew me into corners, billowing my clothes and making a

fantastic fool of me.

Still too stunned for weeping, a single drop chilled on

my cheek.

Trembling at the knees. Hardly knowing the blaze of my own smile.

Am I like this?

Can the world be really so

beautiful…

Can I know what I do not own?

Only when,

Then.

II.

If I could only wind myself around one spiral of Your house, fold myself in one cleft of Your walls. I would stay there content for the rest of my life. To trust Your love is gentle as the February sun, no less true because unusually kind. God does no thing in halves. And I must choose. And I will choose – to let You in, with dripping hands, a wildly beating heart, an urge to dance.

And I said, undivided love is true romance.

III.

Know only “grazie” and say it a thousand times. If I could know but one word,

let me know Your Name. So strange

to find the word that sustains the weary in a different same: Gesu.

Gesu, mio amore e speranza.

Wings

I heard the swift call as I watched
The ease with which it flew:
You dream of wings, while I would wish
To be a maiden true.

I Am Here

I am nestled in my blankets with the fresh and heavy dampness of my hair
around me,
Hearing the refrigerator hum, and the ticking of the pink-rimmed clock that I've had almost for as long as I can remember.
So those old memories pulse like the colors in my closed eyes,
And tingle faintly, like the numbing roughness of my singed tongue --
How I used to scribble in my notebooks,
                                                  I am here
And longed to be remembered for each moment as I lived it. God, put this in Your photo album, tuck it in Your pocket. Let me just say I recognize I am. Right now.
And tell me how You savor days like candy in the corner of Your mouth, for the long ride home.

Maybe I desire because I can't understand, or maybe very transience is beauty.
Maybe I just want to know that I can be delighted in, as I delight in You, this wonder.
One thing is clear: time is only lengthened by points of meaning.

Even in Laughter...

Where Jupiter and Janus embrace: in a two-faced jollity.

When we have scoured all our doubts away,
What will remain but a hymn of praise?

XXVI

Perfect as lentils soaking, each round pebble
Bathed where the water laps, drifts against the current gently.

There juniper exudes a pungent meady scent, and the wood birds are wiser
Than their cultivated brothers. Warbler and thrush have darkly glinting eyes,
And are never startled.
They know these trees, this stream, like their own voices.

And in this heavy bearded wood there are more loamy secrets,
Where spiky pine blankets the condescending lumps of fallen trees.
There a blunderer may find himself in dreams of a peculiar kind,
When light and desire conspire to draw him deeper
Into the forest's pleroma,
And except he is a fool, he will not know it.

There moves the forest's guardian, all draped.
He is the earthy and the intoxicating spirit of this place.
In shape he frustrates any illustration, complete is he,
And any portrait makes his parts absurdity, for he is beauty.

Any eye that sees him finds its deepest fear and dearest joy,
The wanderer is rested in his soul, the hunter rankled,
The lover spoiled of any cheapening love.
Here, in this fecund stillness
Is the utter soul of worlds.

Dido's Lament

When I am laid, am laid in earth...

Visions throng the morning's birth,
Dreams clasp my hand before I rise from rest


...No trouble, no trouble in thy breast.

Consoled me Love, and then caressed
Me Truth, more gentle than the truth is wont to be


Remember me, remember me...

I loved his shadow, verily -
There is no bitterness


...But, ah!

I loved a shadow, verily.




Credits: Italics, "Dido and Aeneas" by Henry Purcell.
J.R.R. Tolkien.
Jesus.