Monday, June 29, 2009

(From Stations of Light) XIII The Women are Holding a Vigil in the Upper Room

XIII The Women are Holding a Vigil in the Upper Room

The women are holding a vigil, they are waiting in the upper room.
The women are holding a vigil, they are waiting in the upper room for their prayers to work.
The women holding a vigil in the upper room are waiting with all of the other disciples.
The women holding a vigil are waiting, their power is waxing, but their voices are steadfast.
The women holding a vigil in the upper room are patient but they mourn and lament waste.
Fruitful and generous, the women holding a vigil in the upper room mother and nurse.
The women in the upper room holding a vigil know there is strength in their number.
The women in the upper room have confidence in mystery and are wise.
The women in the upper room who are holding a vigil study and discern.
That their legacy in battle is a meager one does not imply
that the women holding a vigil in the upper room waiting can not fight.
The women holding a vigil in the upper room are a ferocious

tribe of peace makers.
The women in the upper room waiting and praying are made in God’s image.
The women are waiting in the upper room for deliverance
when it comes they will be ready and in place, “standing at attention.”

Sunday, June 28, 2009

check out "Born Again Catholic" in Brooklyn: online NY Times

Peals of Light

For as long as we have feared
darkness and frigidity, spires
we erect have nosed upwards in
a stretch to reach to touch
the celestial concert of bodies,
ambulant and fixed, whether
arrayed in borrowed light or
radiating with interior fire,
galaxies which dispense the luxury that
light is, borne
on waves as it traverses space and
time that we might be carried away with
ourselves, our senses all fullness,
as we behold and are moved to return
the favor, with choreography, with fingers
upon strings, we, in our colossal
ingenuity attach to sound
frameworks of our own design,
as with lips and larynxes animated
by muscle and soul, we unleash
song all in the service of desire
to offer gifts, to reciprocate, emulate --
Our half-lame gestures,
insufficient and diffuse, dissolve
into air like smoke ascending
from a goat on an altar --
as if God were open
to flattery for we know
it’s the thought that counts
out the measure, that calls
the tune, the pig-headed divine
within us as we hammer away
like clappers in crowns,
attempting scaled-down versions
of whatever meager quotient
of splendor we might manage
to render out of love like that
which moved the God of Genesis
to cure his own loneliness.

On the fifth day of Christmas
my true love gave to me:
five golden rings
of truth, five
haloes, the five books of the Torah,
the five feet of Shakespeare’s
iambs -- the five fingers of the hand,
five short-falling senses
by means of which we exude, execute
ornate strategies and half-baked takes
on the glory of God -- our own
walloping renditions of angels and saints;
whether drafted in ramous pains-
taking reticules of lead and vitrified
emeralds, ambers and burgundies,
or coaxed out of marble,
even the greatest of our puny
efforts do deliver
us out of our skins, move us
from our self-assigned spots.
The bones of our imperfect
artistry glow and a wondrous
argument rumbles within, which
comes to us on waves,
arriving like sound or light. How
proud are we of our ornery Buonarroti,
for example; he worked day and night,
tethered like Sisyphus to rock --
to scaffolding he erected,
his twisted piety a functional
machine strapped to him to him like
a pair of iron wings, and he,
stuck in a dead heat:
longshot in a contest
between him and his better self;
in the end neither of them won,
neither captured the perfect
likeness in perfect light;
but we won, and I like to think
God won too, that when God looked
upon those completed works,
whether wrestled out of rock or left
in a lavish sprawl across the broad vaulted
cappella doubling as the painter’s
canvas, that God took it all
in, and sighed with pleasure, and
knew joy we might compare to that
a parent knows on Christmas morning
upon receiving a hand-drafted gift
containing a multitude of sins which are
not only forgiven but which magical
flaws are exalted or go unseen.
in ordinary light.

On the sixth day of Christmas
my true love gave to me,
six water birds engaged in fruition,
their meat full of knowledge that
warmth itself is a miracle.
On the seventh day of Christmas,
my true love gave to me,
seven swans a-treading water,
genus coscoroba, divine vehicles of
Saraswati, pristine and ferocious,
they devour pearls and mate for life;
and the seven wonders of the world,
the seven forgotten wonders,
the seven natural wonders:
the seven continents, conceived
in love: God’s ornament: the cosmos,
in chromaesthetic strains, green and
thrumming: the buttery wash
of the sun, the milky spill of an early moon
its shattered glow, satiny, silver upon the seven seas,
the loveliness of the human body,
the imagination voluptuous,
the lavender vapors of the heavens,
night divided from day,
the lyre and the soprano,
the glory of the Jews
unbound by the spontaneous
combustion of a voice
coming from a bush;
the seven paths
through which grace --

On the third day of Christmas
my true love gave to me
trois poulets francaises,
seasoned to perfection:
faith, hope and love --
you can sink
your teeth into,
for the trip across the tundra
the heart becomes when it elects
to hibernate. On the eighth day of Christmas
my true love gave to me,
eighty pulsating digits
contracting and relaxing,
engorgement and emptying,
their rhythmic cadences
finishing with a squishing
plash, the principle of supply and demand
alive in the flesh of the holy
cow. On the fourth day of
Christmas my true love gave
to me, four calling songbirds:
Mark, Luke and Matthew,
John’s poem of the word
unfurled: world born of a syllable,
word borne on breath,
flesh made airborne --
On the ninth day of Christmas
my true love presented me
with ninety toes in flight
(How lovely their feet in slippers.)
On the tenth day,
a decade of lords taking leaps
of faith. My true love gave,
o the eleventh day of Christmas
eleven bagpipes voluptuous
as sails, crammed full of anima,
God’s oceanic breath
salted with ecstatic tears --
On the twelfth night
of Christmas my true love gave to me
twelve drummers drumming,
apostolic transmission,
a blessing for my plough,
a bean within a cake,
mummers on parade,
Molly dancers run amok,
low purple skies luminous with lace,
a velvety darkness fire eats,
the luster of fire-lit flesh
refulgent, a hearth well-stoked
kindled by hope, the rings of
Saturn, the things: Saturnalibus,
optimo dierum, glistening days,
nights coursing with music,
straw men and the god of the grape,
cinnamon and clove, blue fire,
white hot heat, a full-bodied
future with a raspberry nose,
vision and stars of wonder,
a fulminating flame to pirate
the chill in us -- to spirit away
the cold, the pendulous commotion
our free-standing campanilli
provide, and carillon music
quickening in towers
courtesy of fists and feet,
and combination pistons,
and pedal and swell, wind chests
and reversible toe studs;
20 ton bourdon bells,
and Angelus strains that wind
through neighborhoods like ours,
the resounding yield of the holy motion
of waisted steel, the strains of crowns
affixed with pivoted clappers
which dispatch arithmetic fluctuating
warbles and bright tones
to saturate the air with partials, tierce and quint,
to sending concentric man-made wobbling
forth, to issue peals with tails that trail off
in spectral pitches, full of
the energy of the radiating sound
which is the square of its amplitude;
tolling in bells by which we mark
morning, noon and night,
marriage and death,
and feasts, like Christmas --
the terrific splash of bells --
our well-rounded ring of
truth to chase our dark away --

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Nada Te Turbe (translation: Teresa D'Avila )

Nothing disturbs you.
Nothing frightens you.
Everything happens. God
is not mute.
Patience is all reaching. Nothing
is wanting from who holds nothing back
from God. God
only is enough.

Capularis

To put one’s affairs in order,
to ponder and articulate,
to ejaculate and swim,
to lug, muddling,
the heavy bodies
our minds are
through emulsifying
tedium and industry,
to be all ears,
to have eyes
in the back of our heads,
to wear our hearts on our sleeves,
to be operatic and porous,
submissive to susceptibility,
mounted by curiosity,
to invite wonder,
to wander ‘round
castles of our own
making, modest, yet baroque,
to capitalize upon the acoustic plenty
we find therein, to ambush our muses,
to push them up against the wall,
as, sultry, domineering and
obedient to octave shifts and
crescendo we commit
to memory and come
to know song by heart,
to consent to being governed by vision,
by seeing what sticks
to the wall when we
catapult it, to fling
our souls into the ring
like a line into surf,
like the flesh of a tomato
going up against
ancient granite,
is to sing ourselves to dream.
And when we sling our souls
forth, their ripe mettle combusts.
Chains sound, the drawbridge
is lifted and towering carillons
resound as accompaniment
to our crossing over into the life of
hurtling death we live
which finds its way into
the concerto. It’s our occupational hazard
to guess. But in any case
the scherzo’s on us.
There’s no getting around it.
You’re always Keats or Yeats,
young in middle-age, immature
in dotage, dashing, in your way,
on your own, in your own way,
your own worst enemy,
your own insurance policy.
Sure, you were fluid once,
but in the end, you are fluent.
If you are lucky, you are
venerable but lust
still, not dead
on the beach,
a good looking corpse,
your work in crates,
your joy disseminated,
attaching where you never would
have expected, the incantations
of your divine tribe taking root
underground, in bloom,
a sharp-looking legend,
whose work is perfectly laid
down upon cross-
thatched cross-
hairs — all fruition, friction,
and operatic luster
(“Da mi colori!“ .)
who were once wily and outsmarting,
with a fine command of perspective,
an all-knowing god in tight pants,
peeling off, flexing jacked-up imagination,
guns out. If you are still here,
still listening, maybe you’re venturing
to guess that maybe lumbering
the distance, unencumbered
by all the times you didn’t get it
right, or get it down
is possible. Growing old,
once an anathema,
is looking pretty
good about now.
The rope-a-dope
tuckers one out,
naturally, but you’re still
fighting Irish
when the bell goes off,
you go off into
action, pummeled as you are
into an ample tenderness.
You’re a great white dope
in love with the holy
Word. In the
mix, you are
in the
clear as a bell’s
echo, delicious
in your way,
no longer in your own way,
armed with ornery
fervor and a few
worthy combinations capable
of ripping away whatever
ropes you’re up against.
You make a loop of their twine
to fashion not a noose
but a curved means of reining in
stars to gather as you gallop
toward the celestial vault
that you might
do with them
what you will —
You’re a god,
peeling
away, like a bell,
pealing, off,
you’re a little
off, in your chariot, leaving
not enough blood
to kill you behind
where it mottles
the canvas, its contours indicate
the shape of crescent
moon burnt in orange,
the color of oxidation,
the ruddy color
of your Irish up,
a revisionist moon
up and ripe
for raving at,
a red moon
to remind you
that maybe waning is waxing,
automatic or waxing lyrical —
maybe it is just
as well beauty
is sacrificed
like a firstborn child
on the altar of faith
by willing participants,
the dumb chumps
who go along
with a cruel joke
a stuttering god articulates
as lust yields but is wasted
on the young,
and suckers like us
with all our expertise
in beauty who stand
by, gaping and open,
sometimes saying precious little
more than “Wow!”
with our Irish up
gaining greatest altitude
just
as the glow begins
to vanish from our flesh,
and the elasticity, which
resiliency can replace,
moves out of our
reach — but maybe
waxing is waning,
maybe beauty is nothing
more than a series of tests and
lavishments a hot and
cold running muse delivers
in a whorl without end —
a world with no end
in sight, a ravishing world
overgrown and lush,
through which,
advancing, we prance,
as, besotted with a certain fidelity
to these savory cuts of music
and the study of pulchritude
on the run, as, besotted
with fixations on surprise,
shadow, wit, mindfulness and song,
as hounded and trumped
by a fascination with what’s difficult,
we keep travelling, stuck
on trains of thought so glorious
who but a poet could possibly
know how to catch one?
We accelerate and thrum,
figuring, who but a poet
can be trusted
to conduct crucial
interviews with the engineer?
Who can be trusted
to conduct the strange adaggio,
say, of equinocturnal snow
such as this one I behold,
which in turn takes hold
of me this instant
as it transpires outside
my window
as inside the chambers
of this poet’s heart
which is one busy
pump tonight.
The flakes fail
to sail straight
but rather they slalom
curvaceous in a downward
waltz at the behest of
gravity, their lacey
voluptuousness aglow
as they tumble and land
with an unheard thrash
upon early shoots of hell-
bent crocuses, which may be
seen and construed
as the frozen upshot of
God’s shooting from the lip,
the aftershock only poets
even if nodding off
in chairs before fires
making love in their dreams
can hear, for their fires are still
going below, their pilot
lights are still blue:
their angel vehicles are still
aloft as ever, eternal dirigibles
amid a marbled firmament, afloat
in a variegated field
of nacreous noctilucence,
amid the ramous circuitry
that reminds me a bit
of those black limbs
encased in ice
my neighborhood pear
tree brandishes; they
overlay an under
drawing which burns
with astonishing ordinary
beauty in my icy fenestral vista:
a modest scene adequately
lovely to incite lachrymal
wetness, depicted, as if in oil,
which right angles and
perimeters my window frame,
delineate, limit and set
apart. Glassed-over
rounding off of new buds
frozen in clear swells
form barely visible molds
of ready green that reached
early from shoots but stopped short,
stunned in the frigid clench
of a casement that is doomed
to cave in under
the weight of light
and the warmth
its live limbs dispatch
in the interest of releasing
dormant verdure from its trans-
lucent, transparent confinement
giving way to an arching rhapsody
of swollen tips, lips, fists
against the death winter
doesn’t always have to be.
A bright backlash follows
having waited so long
for the “go ahead” —
The waxing heat
comes as it may,
comes as it can,
armed with explosive
wetness and romping
pulse with which we,
O, supple bards,
have some sense of
what to do. It is for this
reason we may decide
we might be wise
to stick around a while
if only to see
what develops,
knowing all
too well
the inspiration
that is ours
doesn’t come
cheap,
but it comes.




"capularis" -- Latin for having one foot in the grave.

Monday, June 22, 2009

check out "A Few of the Things We Couldn't Do Without" by Ian Ganassi !

Saturday, May 30, 2009

from Stations of Light,. IX Pentecost

In this quaking chamber
of my heart I carry a torch
where a halo might rest.

I summon the force that
drawn downward might
dissolve the lock the mind

holds upon itself.
I summon the might.
The voice in the light

that lavishes the strength
of its fire upon me,
is the voice that breaks

news, the force that breaks
open the Word, the promise kept:
the created Word that transforms,

more splendid than a newborn’s wail,
than heroic feet, cello strings or the glimmering
commotion of larks as they feast, bold, on scarlet

berries tinged with glints of light as
they
intone and cavort: the Word immediate;
comes as a caress,


as if to say: take a piece of my heart;
as if to say: it burns for you, my dove,
as if to say: take all of me

as if to say: whoever you are I love you.
as if to say: whoever you call me I am
love as if to say: come, love.

As if to say: come.

Saturday, July 5, 2008

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Check out From Gods' Mouth to My Ears on Fickle Muses.