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Now I begin to know at last, These nights when I sit down to rhyme, The form and measure of that vast God we call Poetry, he who stoops And leaps me through his paper hoops A little higher every time. Tempts me to think I’ll grow a proper Singing cricket or grass-hopper Making prodigious jumps in air While shaken crowds about me stare Aghast, and I sing, growing bolder To fly up on my master’s shoulder Rustling the thick stands of his hair. He is older than the seas, Older than the plains and hills, And older than the light that spills From the sun’s hot wheel on these. He wakes the gale that tears your trees, He sings to you from window sills. At you he roars, or he will coo, He shouts and screams when hell is hot, Riding on the shell and shot. He smites you down, he succours you, And where you seek him, he is not. To-day I see he has two heads Like Janus—calm, benignant, this; That, grim and scowling: his beard spreads From chin to chin: this god has power Immeasurable at every hour: He first taight lovers how to kiss, He brings down sunshine after shower, Thunder and hate are his also, He is YES and he is NO. The black beard spoke and said to me, ‘Human fraility though you be, Yet shout and crack your whip, be harsh! They’ll obey you in the end: Hill and field, river and marsh Shall obey you, hop and skip At the terrour of your whip, To your gales of anger bend.’ The pale beard spoke and said in turn ‘True: a prize goes to the stern, But sing and laugh and easily run Through the wide airs of my plain, Bathe in my waters, drink my sun, And draw my creatures with soft song; They shall follow you along Graciously with no doubt or pain.’ Then speaking from his double head The glorious fearful monster said ‘I am YES and I am NO, Black as pitch and white as snow, Love me, hate me, reconcile Hate with love, perfect with vile, So equal justice shall be done And life shared between moon and sun. Nature for you shall curse or smile: A poet you shall be, my son.’

We dressed for church.  I had a white hat and white gloves when I was fifteen, no joke. You had to do that to show God you cared. God's eyes were stained glass, and his voice was pipe organ. He was immortal, invisible, while my panty-hose itched and my atheist father chewed his tongue and threatened to run out the door but didn't for my mother's sake, and she swallowed her fate, this marriage, like a communion cracker, and my brain- damaged brother lurched around the church nursery, and my sweeter sister watched me with huge brown eyes to see what I'd do next. My God, why did I turn my eyes upward when we were all there, then, in the flesh? I am so sorry about God, sorry we fastened that word to the sky. God's not even legal in Hebrew. If you get the vowel caught between the two consonants of your lips, it can carry you dangerously up like a balloon over what you'd give anything to be in the middle of, now.

God! How I hate you, you young cheerful men, Whose pious poetry blossoms on your graves As soon as you are in them, nurtured up By the salt of your corruption, and the tears Of mothers, local vicars, college deans, And flanked by prefaces and photographs From all you minor poet friends—the fools— Who paint their sentimental elegies Where sure, no angel treads; and, living, share The dead’s brief immortality Oh Christ! To think that one could spread the ductile wax Of his fluid youth to Oxford’s glowing fires And take her seal so ill! Hark how one chants— “Oh happy to have lived these epic days”— “These epic days”! And he’d been to France, And seen the trenches, glimpsed the huddled dead In the periscope, hung in the rusting wire: Chobed by their sickley fœtor, day and night Blown down his throat: stumbled through ruined hearths, Proved all that muddy brown monotony, Where blood’s the only coloured thing. Perhaps Had seen a man killed, a sentry shot at night, Hunched as he fell, his feet on the firing-step, His neck against the back slope of the trench, And the rest doubled up between, his head Smashed like and egg-shell, and the warm grey brain Spattered all bloody on the parados: Had flashed a torch on his face, and known his friend, Shot, breathing hardly, in ten minutes—gone! Yet still God’s in His heaven, all is right In the best possible of worlds. The woe, Even His scaled eyes must see, is partial, only A seeming woe, we cannot understand. God loves us, God looks down on this out strife And smiles in pity, blows a pipe at times And calls some warriors home. We do not die, God would not let us, He is too “intense,” Too “passionate,” a whole day sorrows He Because a grass-blade dies. How rare life is! On earth, the love and fellowship of men, Men sternly banded: banded for what end? Banded to maim and kill their fellow men— For even Huns are men. In heaven above A genial umpire, a good judge of sport, Won’t let us hurt each other! Let’s rejoice God keeps us faithful, pens us still in fold. Ah, what a faith is ours (almost, it seems, Large as a mustard-seed)—we trust and trust, Nothing can shake us! Ah, how good God is To suffer us to be born just now, when youth That else would rust, can slake his blade in gore, Where very God Himself does seem to walk The bloody fields of Flanders He so loves!

Do I have to dress up or can I wear jeans? Dear Joaquin, casual Sunday is a plus! Can a woman be fully present in heels? Remember the other day at the shops, we saw the T-shirt that read “Blessed” across the front? I know you picked it up for me as a joke, but it made me pause. I think I am blessed in the way I understand people to mean it: having good fortune. But this is where faith messes with my clean concept, because practicing Christians don’t believe blessings come out the clear blue sky. So here’s God again, all up in the Kool-Aid. I’m dating myself, but I mean that He gets in the way of spiritual minimalism. He is at once contained and uncontainable, which, intellectually, is hard to understand. So being blessed must require that one acts in such a way that presses God to bestow blessings, which isn’t the same thing as good fortune, but I want to believe that people are saying, “You have such good fortune, I hope for good fortune, too,” because it means that no one is preaching at me like, “You have good God-God,” “Father God I hope He Gods for us, too,” “You got God?” Et cetera.

After the trumpets, after the incense There were nights insomnia fathered gods I then rejected as too angry or distracted, Or whose appetite for submission revealed Their own lack of faith.Say our names, All synonyms for trust.

I, peregrine of noon.

Sometimes it takes miles to give up resistance, though the mirror shows a body unresisting, shows perhaps something to admire. Others may. A body without difficulty loosening, breaking its own willfulness, cracking itself like a rusted bolt that finally begins to turn. A body that turns. Toward openness, fantasy, those desires of and not of the body. Sometimes I notice a powerful man engaged steadily repeating difficult action: folding himself, his tight skin, over and over, lifting a declined torso or pulling up a suspended trunk, and think, how neat, how controlled to be inside that body. I struggle not to stare, grip myself not to lose myself inside the thought of being inside that body. I can never get there I know because it is the image I want, the veneer of muscle having taken primacy from mind, now first among equals: bicep, abdominal, quadricep, the launch after launch of a perpetual run. I want the image even when I am it, or nearly it— because even then, I am also that other thing, self-conscious, burdened, struggling for movement. If there is a link between God and animals— the way He identifies with the so much that isn’t us, as He had to have, to have made them— it must be in the body enacting will immediate through movement, as if with a word creating a world (enacting creation immediate through speech). Which is to say, this is my time of prayer, my only time: miles in, as long as it takes for the body to relinquish resistance. Bright, public, surrounded by others who move toward better movement. And all the while seeing in a wall of mirrors that image of myself, deer, horse, running close kin to breathing, motion necessary to survival, perfect image of a man that I’m merely a self-conscious copy of. I pray for things, of course, for myself and for those whose pain touches me, selfish and unselfish prayers for intimates and strangers. I pray for the runner in the mirror, too, sleek, easy animal, unselfconscious and present, and absent as a god, the man who could almost be me, who I do my best to rush toward. I pray that one day, by His grace, we may meet.

I could almost hear their soft collisions on the cold air today, but when I came in, shed my layers and stood alone by the fire, I felt them float toward me like spores flung far from their source, having crossed miles of oceans and fields unknown to most just to keep my body fixed to its place on the earth. Call them God if you must, these messengers that bring hard evidence of what I once was and where I have been— filling me with bits of stardust, whaleskin, goosedown from the pillow where Einstein once slept, tucked in his cottage in New Jersey, dreaming of things I know I’ll never see.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

The summer and autumn had been so wet, That in winter the corn was growing yet, 'Twas a piteous sight to see all around The grain lie rotting on the ground. Every day the starving poor Crowded around Bishop Hatto's door, For he had a plentiful last-year's store, And all the neighbourhood could tell His granaries were furnish'd well. At last Bishop Hatto appointed a day To quiet the poor without delay; He bade them to his great Barn repair, And they should have food for the winter there. Rejoiced such tidings good to hear, The poor folk flock'd from far and near; The great barn was full as it could hold Of women and children, and young and old. Then when he saw it could hold no more, Bishop Hatto he made fast the door; And while for mercy on Christ they call, He set fire to the Barn and burnt them all. "I'faith 'tis an excellent bonfire!" quoth he, "And the country is greatly obliged to me, For ridding it in these times forlorn Of Rats that only consume the corn." So then to his palace returned he, And he sat down to supper merrily, And he slept that night like an innocent man; But Bishop Hatto never slept again. In the morning as he enter'd the hall Where his picture hung against the wall, A sweat like death all over him came, For the Rats had eaten it out of the frame. As he look'd there came a man from his farm— He had a countenance white with alarm; "My Lord, I open'd your granaries this morn, And the Rats had eaten all your corn." Another came running presently, And he was pale as pale could be, "Fly! my Lord Bishop, fly," quoth he, "Ten thousand Rats are coming this way,... The Lord forgive you for yesterday!" "I'll go to my tower on the Rhine," replied he, "'Tis the safest place in Germany; The walls are high and the shores are steep, And the stream is strong and the water deep." Bishop Hatto fearfully hasten'd away, And he crost the Rhine without delay, And reach'd his tower, and barr'd with care All the windows, doors, and loop-holes there. He laid him down and closed his eyes;... But soon a scream made him arise, He started and saw two eyes of flame On his pillow from whence the screaming came. He listen'd and look'd;... it was only the Cat; And the Bishop he grew more fearful for that, For she sat screaming, mad with fear At the Army of Rats that were drawing near. For they have swum over the river so deep, And they have climb'd the shores so steep, And up the Tower their way is bent, To do the work for which they were sent. They are not to be told by the dozen or score, By thousands they come, and by myriads and more, Such numbers had never been heard of before, Such a judgment had never been witness'd of yore. Down on his knees the Bishop fell, And faster and faster his beads did he tell, As louder and louder drawing near The gnawing of their teeth he could hear. And in at the windows and in at the door, And through the walls helter-skelter they pour, And down from the ceiling and up through the floor, From the right and the left, from behind and before, From within and without, from above and below, And all at once to the Bishop they go. They have whetted their teeth against the stones, And now they pick the Bishop's bones: They gnaw'd the flesh from every limb, For they were sent to do judgment on him!