Wisdom

For the young man who would have myrrh from a woman, and cinnamon and aloes, smoother than oil is her mouth. She flatters him with it. Between her lips lies death. The young man learns that as his bride he should instead have taken Wisdom to him. Wisdom is the words that figure her as fear of the Lord. She has seen Israel choose the ways of the oppressor. The young men Strangeness would claim She instructs. Wisdom pleads with them at the city gates that when pride comes, then comes shame. Let a man meet rather with a bear and her whelps than with folly. Withhold not good from those to whom it is due. The Lord’s eyes are on every place, as on Hell and destruction. Whose order was it that made the ends of the earth? Who put clothes on the deep? What is his name, and what is his son’s name, if you can tell? Wisdom can. Still a child, she attended God when God had not yet divided the waters. It was no one but God’s to do to divide what isn’t said from what is. If God was male already, Wisdom was not male. (It may have been Wisdom’s difference from God that let God speak good into being.) Wisdom was God’s delight. She was with him over the waters. The still unformed deep would have lasted had God not given it form. It made God tremble that His call for it to be light there would not let night touch day. (There had to be room between them or they couldn’t be what God said they were.) God and Wisdom were two. Day and night were two also. Day gave it to be seen at once that down was and up. The deep had a face. God’s breath hovered over it until there was wind there instead. The wind is in force in many places over the earth’s dry land. Its going on like that is so it too can have extension and still not be seen. A door woke me. It was having to open and then flap shut against the stable’s north wall. some thuds were back-to-back. After others, there’d be a minute or more of only the wind. The wind had become something the trees had had between them for days now. They’d showed to their tops that they’d be moved only so much. At the same time that it was many trees, the night wind I was hearing them in was one. (One has to be the number God has against the too-many-to-count.) If it had a back to it in those places how far north where right then it was quiet, the wind’s broad front was as high as just below God. (That’s where God starts to be a different nothing than wind.) If nothing’s around the wind to any of its sides, Wisdom confides that God’s around all. Inside all God holds, Wisdom’s at the work of meaning for the faithful that there’s good to be had, if God’s heeded. I wanted to be asleep so I wouldn’t go on making God up out of the wind.