accompanying voice is quiet,
like the trees.
What Jesus offers is out of time.
If we were saints, none of this would be new.
It would all be kindling: yesterday.
Today would be a canvas—even
the alphabet. You might go anywhere,
take a left and never be heard from again.
Not that the people in that place
would care. There, trellised flowers
find the ground, fresh green.
The world is a sandbox.
Everyone puts out a folding chair
just to watch the sun set. A paintbrush
could make the rounds for years
without ever finding a table.
The world is a large eye—
its blinking moves you to the margins.
This is where you’ve always lived.
A young woman could live there, too.
Silence is old, it’s Scandinavian
snow, the heat of an outdoor sauna—
cigar sweat, good liquor. The nearby rocks
collude; though those farther off
choose to remember when they were space dust,
something fitter than this. But they know, too,
that the earth is good in its way, food aplenty
for the travelling-abouts. The leggeds
don’t know where they are going,
but that is their charm.
Clouds are much the same, older.
They sniff the ground like the beasts, tribes.
But rocks! Now they know how to wait!
They settle in the valleys for the long siege,
perch upon ridges, look-outs; they will wait until
only they matter again—things as they should be:
time, that brigand, a passing, futile thing.
Men are like beetles, busying themselves,
fussing, losing all their heat, energy on things
that do not matter, cities that rise like comic hats.
They would do better to bide, to learn
the slow value of the simple phrase, a step
on the mountain. If they could fathom that,
their lives would be changed; they would live
with God, whose voice gives rise
to mottled sunsets, to rifts in oceans, waves.
Those shakings are food for rill and mountain.
They fashion the cold’s flakes here—
the whole universe, a vowel half uttered.
The notes on my wife’s piano pages
are tiny door stops, mice prints
down a dark hall. I do not live in that house;
no one ever has. Beethoven sits on a plush,
dusty chair, lampshade over his illumined head—
the only bulb under a high ceiling,
distressed molding.
A wolf moon shines on a staircase,
but you cannot live there either.
This is what you must keep: the truth of how little
you are, or, better, of how little there is of you.
(Who would miss that when the time comes?)
And all the measureable world?
Something for science.
Your children, as well: how vain to expect
some stepping off point, where they will find fertile
earth, a perfect mate, though in their noons
it will seem so.
We work in the presence of a God we cannot see—
a night. You can lift your little sailboat,
sail it against a window, the snow outside.
Whatever you can add, I don’t want it.
There’s nothing else here—too much to take away.
Jesuit high get-together
They’d always seemed to glide
through the good: one an Arch-Bishop!
How have you done this, I want to ask:
prodigals who knew better—never bothering
with what was beyond them?
They’d seemed like shiny Pennies from Sky King,
listened to a different channel.
Do their children walk on greener turf, I wonder?
Do their wives, Donna Reeds, still smile bashfully
when they get home in the evenings?
And what would it be like to rouse myself
under that sun, to eat every vegetable on my plate?
Bad life choices are what separate us—
though there is more. My father
walks in me; my
