Category: faith

Stranger Still

Through a glass darkly.

In love with an unknown intimate briefly glimpsed, the stranger moved so steadily towards the source of longing that he became transparent with time. Suspended in its liquid, the desert salts of his waking form dissolved in her waters until he knew himself at once known in the shadow of the apocalyptic cherub.

I am surveyed, he admitted, but it was good to be untethered from the demand to be any sort of self in any of the atomic cities, to join the games with no winners, to keep company instead with a chorus of loss, its abundant ache seeded in the silence of this elsewhere when the voices that will be heard choose themselves. 

***

Inspired by various morning readings, including Thomas Merton by way of Richard Rohr. Italicized phrases above come from Thomas Merton’s “Day of the Stranger,” first published in The Hudson Review, summer 1967.

Here is Splendor

Aesthetic aspirations of an avian artist.

Deep in the forest, on the floor where the art risks trampling by a large mammal or easy pillage by interested parties, the bowerbird assembles his offering. His shrine is an elaborate risk of time, energy, and attention, a seemingly superfluous display of beauty.  

Here, a passageway built of two rows of arched sticks bending into one another. Here a wide arc of blue feathers, blue bottlecaps, blue plastic knives, marbles, a costume ring. At the center, a wide-eyed doll, arms splayed and open-mouthed.

The offer comes with no promises beyond the pure beauty he makes visible by this daily art. He makes no pretense of protection, procures no food for the young. You will not catch him visiting the babies in a nest. The audience observes, moves closer, weighing the draw of what beguiles against the risk of being fooled. 

This is his hope: to put forth something so dazzling in its excess of devotion that the ideal witness will find it and be moved, close enough to offer some hope of continuance.

***

Inspired by reading about the beautiful structures built by  bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea (by the males of various species, in the interest of courtship), which brought to mind Robinson Jeffers’ observance of “divinely superfluous beauty.” 

Among Shadows

Treading light.

As I look again 

for a light in the dark, 

let me remember 

how the quality 

of its glow

will shape what 

I can see. May I 

find one to teach 

me to bear 

examination, 

which also allows

for shadows 

to magnify 

some of the shapes 

I’ve been missing, 

that I may find 

language 

and architecture 

for what is barely 

here, to coax 

its becoming, 

feeling edges 

with slow hands,

careful not to break 

the fragile wing, 

for the response 

of some soft give,

breathing.

Fragilities

Considering emergent occasions.

Common practice refers to any “I” with consistency, but there is no monument here, only these constant aberrations. A body may be well one moment, wounded the next, then ill. Same for soul, spirit, mind, and whatever else we try attaching to this ongoing flux.

Also common, at least after a certain point, to wonder each morning, how now? Check pulse, blood pressure, eyes. Are the dark circles back? I remember the years I could not look because I knew. How cold, this seeming indifference. I was angry at her, for being so much less than solid. And possibly more, too; more than I wanted to imagine. I wasn’t myself, we commonly say, looking back on moments like this. And yet, I never asked, who are you? I never asked, how is your name? or what form shall we take, next?

We move more gently now. I check the pressure, coaxing encouragement. C’mon, I whisper, while I wait. Don’t let up. The translation might be a little prayer, some invocation to this small, quaking of tentative flesh and fluctuating fluids, to hold. We are still emerging.

***

Inspired while reading John Donne’s opening meditation in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624).

Tree Service

A life of devotion.

He sleeps at the edge of the nursery, spends his days in the shade of the mango tree. He keeps the planks for his future coffin nearby. Old friends, the tree will ask questions. They keep him up some nights.

He has brought her branch after branch, hundreds of varieties. She shows him how you may begin with the same seed and grow two very different fruits. Like children, he says.

This is a place of study, he says, for the mangoes of the world.

We are fleeting, he says, but the fruit is eternal. We eat and stay a little while, and then we leave.

I am no scientist, he says, just a servant of this tree.

***

Inspired by (and with borrowed phrases from) recent New York Times article (by Mujib Mashal and Hari Kumar) about Mango Man, also profiled here. 

At the Shore

A conversation in the interim.

With the tides coming and going, finding the hidden treasure is often a matter of patience.

Which ocean?

This mind, or whatever you call it. There’s something I am trying to recover.

So now what?

Now I wait.

Hmm. It doesn’t look like you are doing anything.

Yeah. But remember those seeds we planted?

I love those trees! It’s amazing how they went from––

Yeah, but before all that, remember? After we planted, it looked like nothing. Root growth always does. But the tree won’t take if it doesn’t happen.

Wait. Is this about the ocean, or tree growth?

I’m mixing metaphors. It’s about learning to wait when you are trying to make a thing happen.

Got it. What’s happening now?

Plea

From a branch over unknown waters.

If I am to be severed from my first attachments, make me a bridge between relief and this emerging specter, too terrible to name.

Let me accept what may follow this request, including instructions for rooting this body as an anchor in what it dreads––or else I am no link, just a floating possibility.

Let me brace against what may yet be, extending out over the dark deep, to this unknown shore: the craggy, silty, boggy knot of its broiling terror. 

Lend courage to this limb, that I may hold. If I am far from the tree, let my spine be the crossing from the land of none to the place where it might yet be.

Hold

Notes in the dark.

In a dark room, a tiny flame is enough to live by. All it takes to extinguish it is a momentary deprivation of oxygen. Snuff out, they call this. Here is why it matters: to carry these little lights out: small, steady, slow moving, especially into nameless places that look like nothing. None of us, not one, can light ourselves. This is what it means to keep watch. 

What are you doing?

Keeping.

Keeping what?

Watch.

For?

Life. 

What is the point?

The living.

And when I can’t see it?

Still, the living.

I can’t today.

Then wait with the dead.

And do what?

Wait. Keep the candles lit.

This Mourning

Still life with children.

Overheard, in the garden: Peter, put your sword away. 

Now is the time for your attention. 

If this to be a becoming, you cannot hold your guard. 

It is impossible to bend into another body 

while remaining upright. Hold another.

For what?

A dark hour. Then, keep holding. Wait.

***

In mourning, we unknow ourselves. 

This is not an affirmation, 

not a possibility or an idea.

***

What is it, then? 

To stand in grief with any other, 

bodies bowed to collect 

what won’t fit in the borders 

of any one, is to accept 

a constant invitation 

to unknow myself. 

I was never a beginning 

or an end––once or now, 

and will never be. 

Only we are here. 

Hold.

Sacrament of Memory

For the never forgetting.

At the baths, questions. The woman walks ahead. A man stops her to ask for a cigarette. I don’t smoke, he tells her. Okay, she agrees, and hands one over. Never forget, he says, regarding God’s words to St. Catherine. She wonders what. Only: you are who is not, and I am what is.

The bathers look on. One claps, considering the speaker must have heard it from the source. But what is faith if you can earn a degree in it? Its most common translation: madness. And who are the faithful, seeming so alone? Is this what it looks like, the communion of saints?

Why would anybody swim with a lighted candle? Whatever it is, he wants to know, so he stops her to remark upon the color of her hair in the light. What else is lost in translation? Only the translator as she leaves him.

There’s a landslide in the living room, the entrance a sacrament. By his side, a clock, a gourd, an empty bottle. Now comes the good oil, anointing by proxy. Now a confession from the madman: he never learned to smoke. It’s too hard, he says. Better to learn not to do things. 

Now the rain again. Now the bread and wine. A furtive look in the mirror. Who is this man? At communion, heads bow, I am not worthy. But say the word. The bottles fill with rain.

***

This is the second of two posts inspired by Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia. The first was over a week ago. The reason for the gap is that it tends to take me a long time to watch a film, life being what it is and only so many hours in a day. Since I really love this one, it took less than two weeks. Now I would like to see every film this director ever made.