to the millions of surfaces that present themselves
to a visitor’s eye at each turn along
the arcing, neatly bordered pathways. All this
beneath broad, heavy-leafed trees not native
to this corner of the state: copper beech,
ginkgo, weeping red maple. We are a world apart,
not entirely to ourselves, just safely to one side.
But it was not the brick dorms or landscaping,
the dress code or college list that drew me
twenty years ago to these lawns, this life decked
with adolescents. It was the canvas hammock
you said most visitors never see slung across
the stream—between two birches—behind the rink.
Fall and spring, you and your friends would go there
and one at a time climb into the heavy cotton, pull
the frayed sides up across your chests and swing,
companions pumping the ropes for you, and all the way
to the top you’d turn, face nothing but the water
beneath you, then over you’d go—again
and again—wrapped in the weathered chrysalis.
I cannot say exactly what it was about that
late April afternoon that won me over to the job,
but I will be ever grateful for the detour.
The God of glory thunders.
Psalm 29:3
Neighbor as Theologian
How can she talk about a “word from God”?
The weather, yes, or the fate of our hedge.
A snake or the shrinking odds of her spouse
beating cancer, sure. But a word from God?
As though God were an actual person,
albeit incomprehensibly vast.
Yet this is how she talks, the way I talk
about my son from whom I could never
hear too much or too often, who’s only
hours away in Brooklyn. Why, unless
my sin were envy, would I begrudge her
an assurance of contact? More likely,
I long for what she has, embarrassed, pained
by my lack of openness to mystery—
which, she has told me, is wholly present
in, with, and under the hedge between us.
When you hid your face, I was dismayed.
Psalm 30:7
As It Is
The face of God is hidden from me.
I see only old walls, the clutter
of familiar rooms, shelves of books, snapshots,
mix-and-match decor. Awake or asleep
and dreaming, no divine shook-foil glimmer
for my inmost eye. Rumors reach me
of others’ encounters—glimpses of His face—
but after devouring these, the want
remains. Is there some special training I need?
Last week a friend confided that for years
the Holy Ghost has shimmered inside her,
every moment beatific. My resolve:
to pretend my friend is not a liar
or schizophrenic—and to seek new friends.
He showed his wonderful love to me when I was in a besieged city.
Psalm 31:21
Putting a Name to the Face
In Madagascar or Peru, St. Kitts
or Tasmania, wherever children,
despite suffering, find games to play
or halt play to marvel at a column
of clouds collecting on some horizon;
wherever anyone takes care to make
ready a back room for a visitor—
sweep the floor for the ten-thousandth time,
place a fresh flower on the pillow—there
a glimpse, the face you know you know
in a crowd of strangers who disappears
before you get a fix on the distance
between you—
mercy!—
and that face.
Do not be like the horse or the mule which have no understanding.
Psalm 32:9
Brother Chronos
Radio-controlled and programmed to check
in every four hours with an atomic
device deep in some bunker in Denver,
my travel clock is more monk than truant
on probation, for it desires correction,
six times a day turns out toward the big
unseen—receives it—then turns back
to serving my fascination with time.
No trumpet sounds to signal the clock’s
connecting moment—a mute faithfulness
wholly
