246 Spiritual poems

One spring night, at the end of my street God was lying in wait. A friend and I were sitting in his new sedan like a couple of cops on surveillance, shooting the breeze to pass the time, chatting up the daydreams, the raw deals, all the wouda-coulda-shoulda’s, the latest “Can you believe that?” As well as the little strokes of luck, the so-called triumphs, small and unforeseen, that kept us from cashing it all in. And God, who’s famous for working in mysterious ways and capable of anything, took the form of a woman and a man, each dressed in dark clothes and desperate enough to walk up to the car and open the doors. And God put a gun to the head of my friend— right against the brain stem, where the orders go out not only to the heart and the lungs but to consciousness itself—a cold muzzle aimed at where the oldest urges still have their day: the one that says eat whatever’s at hand, the one that wants only to fuck, the one that will kill if it has to… And God said not to look at him or he’d blow us straight to kingdom come, and God told us to keep our hands to ourselves, as if she weren’t that kind of girl. Suddenly time was nothing, our lives were cheap, the light in the car cold, light from a hospital, light from a morgue. And the moments that followed—if that’s what they were— arrived with a nearly unbearable weight, until we had acquired a center of gravity as great as the planet itself. My friend could hardly speak— he was too busy trying not to die— which made me chatter all the more, as if words, even the most ordinary ones, had the power to return us to our lives. And behind my ad-libbed incantation, my counterspell to fear, the orders still went out: keep beating, keep breathing, you are not permitted to disappear, even as one half of God kept bitching to the other half that we didn’t have hardly no money at all, and the other half barked, “I’m telling you to shut your mouth!” and went on rummaging through the back seat. And no one at all looking out their window, no one coming home or going out… Until two tall neighbors came walking toward us like unsuspecting saviors…  And God grabbed the little we’d been given, the little we still had, and hustled on to the next dark street.

In Exodus Moses is hidden in a cleft, behind God’s hand, begging, and he sees — rushing past him — God’s back, diminishing. Moses stops begging. God’s back is black fog. I know. He, we guess, means to do it, to do all of this. The brute center part of an iridescent moth. The carnation against the man.

The burnt church up the street yawns to the sky, its empty windows edged in soot, its portals boarded up and slathered with graffiti, oily layers, urgent but illegible. All that can be plundered has been, all but the carapace—the hollow bell tower, the fieldstone box that once served as a nave. The tidy row of homes that line this block have tended lawns and scalloped bathtub shrines. Each front porch holds a chair where no one sits. Those who live here triple lock their doors day and night. Some mornings they step out to find a smoking car stripped to its skeleton abandoned at the curb. Most afternoons the street is still but for a mourning dove and gangs of pigeons picking through the grass. Our Lady of Perpetual Help is gray, a dead incisor in a wary smile. A crevice in her wall allows a glimpse into the chancel, where a sodden mattress and dirty blanket indicate that someone finds this place a sanctuary still, takes his rest here, held and held apart from passers by, their cruelties and their kindnesses, watched over by the night’s blind congregation, by the blank eyes of a concrete saint.

Always the sky keeps expanding. Wide as America’s brave margins, wide as my loneliness in the Middle West. I lean against a dust cloud behind us, the glory sinking into a muted timberline. I am drunk with longing. The wind is singing— my drunken friend, the wind, hurls sweet curses at my face. We have learned to love this road, which lies down like pythons, refuses to forgive our excesses, refuses to consider us kin. Our driver’s sign overhead reads,Jesus is my co-pilot. Jesus who crossed the city gates of his ancestors on a road carpeted by palms. Our goodtime driver must know this— he drives with abandon, despite our fragile cargo: scholars and accountants, prophets and exiles all the same to him. The road, which suggests things, is tired of ceremony. It lies down to sleep like the snow. Lie down TallMountain, lie down Serafin Syquia, lie down Li-Young, lie down Divakaruni, lie down Eman Lacaba, lie down pilgrims of the open road. Shameless, we gather our light jackets in balls. We rest our heads, our faces upturned to a squall of stars. I near the end, my soul recites. O loneliness, my body responds. This empty road is a house where no one lives. What strange fire we bring when we come to this house.

[Supposed to be written by one at the point of death] Give me my scallop shell of quiet, My staff of faith to walk upon, My scrip of joy, immortal diet, My bottle of salvation, My gown of glory, hope’s true gage, And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage. Blood must be my body’s balmer, No other balm will there be given, Whilst my soul, like a white palmer, Travels to the land of heaven; Over the silver mountains, Where spring the nectar fountains; And there I’ll kiss The bowl of bliss, And drink my eternal fill On every milken hill. My soul will be a-dry before, But after it will ne’er thirst more; And by the happy blissful way More peaceful pilgrims I shall see, That have shook off their gowns of clay, And go apparelled fresh like me. I’ll bring them first To slake their thirst, And then to taste those nectar suckets, At the clear wells Where sweetness dwells, Drawn up by saints in crystal buckets. And when our bottles and all we Are fill’d with immortality, Then the holy paths we’ll travel, Strew’d with rubies thick as gravel, Ceilings of diamonds, sapphire floors, High walls of coral, and pearl bowers. From thence to heaven’s bribeless hall Where no corrupted voices brawl, No conscience molten into gold, Nor forg’d accusers bought and sold, No cause deferr’d, nor vain-spent journey, For there Christ is the king’s attorney, Who pleads for all without degrees, And he hath angels, but no fees. When the grand twelve million jury Of our sins and sinful fury, ’Gainst our souls black verdicts give, Christ pleads his death, and then we live. Be thou my speaker, taintless pleader, Unblotted lawyer, true proceeder, Thou movest salvation even for alms, Not with a bribed lawyer’s palms. And this is my eternal plea To him that made heaven, earth, and sea, Seeing my flesh must die so soon, And want a head to dine next noon, Just at the stroke when my veins start and spread, Set on my soul an everlasting head. Then am I ready, like a palmer fit, To tread those blest paths which before I writ.

God of lost souls, thou who are lost amongst the gods, hear me: Gentle Destiny that watchest over us, mad, wandering spirits, hear me: I dwell in the midst of a perfect race, I the most imperfect. I, a human chaos, a nebula of confused elements, I move amongst finished worlds—peoples of complete laws and pure order, whose thoughts are assorted, whose dreams are arranged, and whose visions are enrolled and registered. Their virtues, O God, are measured, their sins are weighed, and even the countless things that pass in the dim twilight of neither sin nor virtue are recorded and catalogued. Here days and night are divided into seasons of conduct and governed by rules of blameless accuracy. To eat, to drink, to sleep, to cover one’s nudity, and then to be weary in due time. To work, to play, to sing, to dance, and then to lie still when the clock strikes the hour. To think thus, to feel thus much, and then to cease thinking and feeling when a certain star rises above yonder horizon. To rob a neighbour with a smile, to bestow gifts with a graceful wave of the hand, to praise prudently, to blame cautiously, to destroy a sound with a word, to burn a body with a breath, and then to wash the hands when the day’s work is done. To love according to an established order, to entertain one’s best self in a preconceived manner, to worship the gods becomingly, to intrigue the devils artfully—and then to forget all as though memory were dead. To fancy with a motive, to contemplate with consideration, to be happy sweetly, to suffer nobly—and then to empty the cup so that tomorrow may fill it again. All these things, O God, are conceived with forethought, born with determination, nursed with exactness, governed by rules, directed by reason, and then slain and buried after a prescribed method. And even their silent graves that lie within the human soul are marked and numbered. It is a perfect world, a world of consummate excellence, a world of supreme wonders, the ripest fruit in God’s garden, the master-thought of the universe. But why should I be here, O God, I a green seed of unfulfilled passion, a mad tempest that seeketh neither east nor west, a bewildered fragment from a burnt planet? Why am I here, O God of lost souls, thou who art lost amongst the gods?

“I have heard (but not believed) the spirits of the dead May walk again.” Winter’s Tale If spirits walk, Love, when the night climbs slow The slant footpath where we were wont to go, Be sure that I shall take the self-same way To the hill-crest, and shoreward, down the gray, Sheer, gravelled slope, where vetches straggling grow. Look for me not when gusts of winter blow, When at thy pane beat hands of sleet and snow; I would not come thy dear eyes to affray, If spirits walk. But when, in June, the pines are whispering low, And when their breath plays with thy bright hair so As some one's fingers once were used to play— That hour when birds leave song, and children pray, Keep the old tryst, sweetheart, and thou shalt know If spirits walk.

They say you are made of clouds, they say you are made of feathers, they say you are everywhere or nowhere—we know you are both. Our flight is delayed, this airport another nowhere.If this is your final destination, the air murmurs,if a stranger or anyone you do not know well offers you anything... but how well & what's he offering & is this our final destination? At the hotel a man hands us the key to room three one three—home for a week or so. On the lobby tv a woman once apparently enormous holds her old jeans up to her body & smiles. Neil Diamond sings & when I go in- to the bathroom he follows.Everybody has one. Paradise is cloudless, they say, impossible to know. Yesterday a man was sucked into the earth as he slept—a sinkhole opened below his bed—not even his brother could save him. In the hotel restaurant my daughter orders corn flakes, they come with a pitcher of milk, she pours nearly all of it into her bowl, until I stop her she will keep on pouring. Three more tvs are screwed into the wall above us—a car goes round & round, a pitcher throws a baseball, a woman slams her racket to the clay. My daughter pushes her bowl away, picks two packets of jelly from the basket, pulls the plastic off one, then the other, lifts each to her tongue—red, then purple. The wallpaper is the texture of trees, a landscape seen from above, a contour map of an unnamed mountain, people wandering the face of it. If we were closer we could tell river from leaf, mountain from shadow, a fire making, unmaking itself. What is this strand of DNA between us, unconnected to & of the shadows parading past, our outlines already chalked into the earth? I live on air & light, I drag my daughter everywhere, this morning she muttered Federer Federer Federer like a spell & it was as if he stood before us again, his perfect red jersey. How many mornings, the sun not yet up, did I swivel on the red stool at the supermarket lunch counter, my mother in back extruding donuts, the aisles dark & empty behind us—she'd bundled me into the car still sleeping to get there. I'd twirl or wander or make toast, contemplating the basket of butter & jelly, each in its little wasteful tub, impervious to air or time or decay.Angel of Grape, your purple body not only filled those coffins but took the shape of those coffins—emptiness made whole, color now a shape.Angel, my daughter now wants only you, she asks for the whole basket, she pulls back each sheet, puts her tongue in— strawberry is her favorite, because it tastes like strawberry.

for Stephen A blind girl steps over the red staves Of a tub. Steam rising from her shoulders and hair, She walks across a dirt floor to you. I think you are not her grandfather. You watch with her a pink man Who has avoided taxes for two winters— He is being judged by roosters And has been chased this far into the countryside. Above him Burning sacks of bat dung are arranged In the purple branches of the thistle trees. The river is indifferent to him. And so are we. You tell your mistress the burning bags of shit Are like inert buddhas Dissolving in a field of merit. She giggles. A front tooth is loose. With the river bottom clear as the night air, The bargeman sings through the hungry vapors Rising now like white snakes behind him. You told his wife that Lord Buddha made wasps From yellow stalks of tobacco with a dark spit. Down in the cold bamboo a starving woman Has opened a small pig— The old moons climb from its blue glistening stomach, Or is it light From the infinitely receding sacks of shit? Master, where is the difference?

It is scribbled along the body Impossible even to say a word An alphabet has been stored beneath the ground It is a practice alphabet, work of the hand Yet not, not marks inside a box For example, this is a mirror box Spinoza designed such a box and called it the Eighth Sky called it the Nevercadabra House as a joke Yet not, not so much a joke not Notes for Electronic Harp on a day free of sounds (but I meant to write “clouds”) At night these same boulevards fill with snow Lancers and dancers pass a poisoned syringe, as you wrote, writing of death in the snow, Patroclus and a Pharoah on Rue Ravignan It is scribbled across each body Impossible even to name a word Look, you would say, how the sky falls at first gently, then not at all Two chemicals within the firefly are the cause, twin ships, twin nemeses preparing to metamorphose into an alphabet in stone St.-Benoit-sur-Loire to Max Jacob