You Teach Me Light. Melaney Poli

      The whole of life lives in the verb “seeing.”

      —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

      Foreword

      It’s like walking into an old shop filled with drawers; each drawer contains a map and each map wants to take you. The poems in You teach me light take you to a place you’ve been but didn’t really see, a place you’ve not been but ache to see, a place that will teach you light, yes, and that “art . . . demands total faith, even surrender, maybe the death of the life you walked in with.” Poli’s small maps take you everywhere you must go if you want to walk out of the shop and “days and months later know you have not breathed the same way since.”

      Jeanie Tomasko

      Acknowledgements

      Anglican Theological Review: Arizona; variation and fugue on a happy liturgical typo; You teach me light

      The Christian Century: Salzburg, Republic of Austria, July 2006; Horizons

      Clare: Ursa Vestiarii

      Julian’s Window: from a manual on forgiveness

      RightHandPointing: Thank you for small beginnings

      Thank you for small beginnings

      for the edge of the sheet tucked back

      the pillowcase pulled on, thank you

      for the one corner swept, the linen

      basket filled, for one box emptied,

      one letter begun, for one spoon washed,

      one verse of a poem written down,

      for one shoe placed

      neatly by another, the needle threaded,

      the first page read, thank you, thank you,

      thank you

      the monk who wrote himself to death

      In this world one collects things, you see,

      and to some certain falls the thankless chore

      of garnering words, stringing them one

      upon another, and if you’re auspicious,

      relinquishing them at a profit (it’s known

      as selling one’s soul). To be sure,

      for the prophets the cost will be higher,

      the collection more probing and pitiless;

      and depending on the lie of your fears

      your words are a net, or a fire:

      a snare your readers can catch you in, or your hell

      of feeding an insatiable blaze.

      And either way it’s a hall of mirrors,

      where each beaded word tricks the light,

      and no amount of spooling will spell

      any certain escape from this maze.

      There is a way out of course, and quite

      simple: the ring of fire, the breath

      of air, and the land beyond guile

      and names. You can get there by prayer—

      or by letting go of knowing the way,

      both are the same: a kind of death

      to what was before, with a smile

      that knows there is nothing to say.

      On missing my tour of the St John’s Bible, Collegeville, Minnesota

      Of course it sucks. I didn’t come a thousand miles and bucks

      to get disappointed this much. I expected crême brulée, got

      a mouthful of baking powder. Scrubbed out my expectations.

      Some mistake.

      I like to think art has an answer to everything; it’s an artist’s sin.

      Maybe I just wanted to get smashed on beauty, stoned on lovely

      adjectives. Or maybe the hope that beholding will make me

      able to see.

      Should I say (I who have learned, something) God you are my

      best illumination, it’s by your being that I see? Should I rather say

      I now go out and see people like illuminations, walking? Perhaps

      I don’t know my power

      or perhaps I don’t desire. And I know nothing

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