246 Spiritual poems

Because he barely heard the voice of God above the hum of other choristers— batwing and bird-whistle, gathering thunder, the hiss of tides retreating, children, cattle; because he could not readily discern the plan Whoever Is In Charge Here has, he wondered about those who claimed to have blessed assurances or certainty: a One and Only Way and Truth and Life, as if Whatever Breathes in Everything mightn’t speak in every wondrous tongue; as if, of all creations, only one made any sense. It made no sense to him. Hunger he understood, touch, desire. He knew the tenderness humans could do, no less brutalities.  He knew the cold morning, the broad meadow, the gold sunset. One evening on the hill of Knocknagaroon, the Atlantic on one side, the Shannon on the other, the narrowing headlands of the peninsula out behind him, the broad green palm of Moveen before him, it seemed he occupied the hand of God: open, upturned, outstretched, uplifting him.

It wasn’t the bright hems of the Lord’s skirts that brushed my face and I opened my eyes to see from a cleft in rock His backside; it’s a wasp perched on my left cheek. I keep my eyes closed and stand perfectly still in the garden till it leaves me alone, not to contemplate how this century ends and the next begins with no one I know having seen God, but to wonder why I get through most days unscathed, though I live in a time when it might be otherwise, and I grow more fatherless each day. For years now I have come to conclusions without my father’s help, discovering on my own what I know, what I don’t know, and seeing how one cancels the other. I've become a scholar of cancellations. Here, I stand among my father’s roses and see that what punctures outnumbers what consoles, the cruel and the tender never make peace, though one climbs, though one descends petal by petal to the hidden ground no one owns. I see that which is taken away by violence or persuasion. The rose announces on earth the kingdom of gravity. A bird cancels it. My eyelids cancel the bird. Anything might cancel my eyes: distance, time, war. My father said,Never take your both eyes off of the world

I will enter you as hope enters me, through blinding liquid, light of rain, and I will stay inside until you send me out; I will stay inside until you ground me. We cannot outrun the rain. So many summers I have tried. So many summers. But when the rumble calls after the spark there can be no escape. No outstripping the drench soak, the wet sheath, the water caul. This is more than you want to hear. Much more than I want to tell you. Tabernacle transporting my life from the desert, you, the faith I am born and reborn into, you, rescuer, deliverer of rain.

All day long I've been hidden, enmeshed, locked in the shadow of the holy mountain, my body covered with shame. I'd hoped there would be a dog barking furiously. Unable to go forward, unable to go back, at least with the sound of a dog barking I'd attain something. . . something. Instead of a dog barking there was silence, then the sound of a drum beaten loud & fast by a young nun. Into this temple come none of the grand sounds, none of the great thoughts. In the cabbage field, heads all the same size are profiles of young novice nuns & the priestesses sitting in Unmun Temple. Young faces like dew, like hoarfrost.

How hard it is to sleep in the middle of a life. — Audre Lorde We wake in the middle of a life,                    hungry. We smear durian            along our mouths, sing soft death a lullaby. Carcass breath, eros of  licked fingers and the finest perfume. What is love if  not         rot? We wear the fruit’s hull as a spiked crown, grinning in green armor.   Death to the grub, fat in his milky shuffle! Death to the lawlessness       of dirt! Death to mud and its false chocolate!   To the bloated sun we want to slice open and yolk                      all over the village. We want a sun-drenched           slug feast, an omelet loosening its folds like hot Jell-O. We want the marbled fat of steak and all        its swirling pink galaxies. We want the drool, the gnash, the pluck of each corn kernel, raw and summer                   swell. Tears welling up                     oil. Order up! Pickled cucumbers piled like logs for a fire, like fat limbs we pepper and succulent                in. Order up: shrimp chips curling in a porcelain bowl like subway seats. Grapes peeled from bitter bark — almost translucent, like eyes we would rather see. Little girl, what do you leave, leaven              in your sight? Death to the open eyes of  the dying. Here,           there are so many open eyes we can’t close each one.          No, we did not say the steamed eye of a fish. No eyelids fluttering like no butterfly wings. No purple yam lips. We said eyes. Still and resolute as a heartbreaker.         Does this break your heart?                                      Look, we don’t want to be rude, but seconds, please. Want: globes of oranges swallowed whole like a basketball or Mars or whatever planet is the most delicious.                   Slather Saturn! Ferment Mercury! Lap up its film of dust, yuk sung! Seconds, thirds, fourths! Meat wool! A bouquet of chicken feet! A garden of                   melons, monstrous in their bulge!               Prune back nothing. We purr in this garden. We comb through berries and come out so blue. Little girl,                            lasso tofu, the rope slicing its belly clean. Deep fry a cloud so it tastes like bitter gourd or your father leaving — the exhaust of his car, charred. Serenade a snake and slither its tongue into yours and                           bite. Love! What is love if  not knotted in garlic? Child, we move through graves like eels, delicious         with our heads first, our mouths agape. Our teeth:         little needles to stitch a factory of everything made in China.      You ask: Are you hungry? Hunger eats through the air like ozone. You ask: What does it mean to be rootless? Roots are good to use as toothpicks. You: How can you wake in the middle of a life? We shut and open our eyes like the sun shining on tossed pennies in a forgotten well. Bald copper, blood. Yu choy bolts                  into roses down here. While you were sleeping, we woke to the old leaves of  your backyard shed and ate that and one of your lost flip-flops too. In a future life, we saw rats overtake a supermarket with so much milk, we turned opaque. We wake to something boiling. We wake to wash dirt from lettuce, to blossom into your face. Aphids along the lashes. Little girl, don’t forget              to take care of  the chickens, squawking in their mess and stench. Did our mouths buckle                                at the sight of  you devouring slice                after slice of  pizza and the greasy box too? Does this frontier swoon for you? It’s time to wake up. Wake the tapeworm who loves his home. Wake the ants,                  let them do-si-do a spoonful of  peanut butter. Tell us, little girl, are you hungry, awake,                               astonished enough?

What god was it that would open earth’s picture book and see the two of us on a road, snowfields glittering on every side and poplars bent like the fingers of an old man clutching what he loved about the sun? Which one was it that would peer into our thatched, white-washed farmhouse, and see the fur, flies, and shit-stained walls? Which one laughed at the barbed wire fences, the wall topped with broken glass? Which of the many who came then, gleaming and rimed in hard sunlight? Which of those who bobbed like ice along the winter shore? What did we have that any god would want? Quick, if you can find it, hide it.

THE WAY OUT The night is covered with signs. The body and face of man, with signs, and his journeys.     Where the rock is split and speaks to the water;     the flame speaks to the cloud; the red splatter, abstraction, on the door speaks to the angel and the constellations. The grains of sand on the sea-floor speak at last to the noon. And the loud hammering of the land behind speaks ringing up the bones of our thighs, the hoofs, we hear the hoofs over the seethe of the sea. All night down the centuries, have heard, music of passage. Music of one child carried into the desert; firstborn forbidden by law of the pyramid. Drawn through the water with the water-drawn people led by the water-drawn man to the smoke mountain. The voice of the world speaking, the world covered by signs, the burning, the loving, the speaking, the opening. Strong throat of sound from the smoking mountain. Still flame, the spoken singing of a young child. The meaning beginning to move, which is the song. Music of those who have walked out of slavery. Into that journey where all things speak to all things refusing to accept the curse, and taking for signs the signs of all things, the world, the body which is part of the soul, and speaks to the world, all creation being created in one image, creation. This is not the past walking into the future, the walk is painful, into the present, the dance not visible as dance until much later. These dancers are discoverers of God. We knew we had all crossed over when we heard the song. Out of a life of building lack on lack: the slaves refusing slavery, escaping into faith: an army who came to the ocean: the walkers who walked through the opposites, from I to opened Thou, city and cleave of the sea. Those at flaming Nauvoo, the ice on the great river: the escaping Negroes, swamp and wild city: the shivering children of Paris and the glass black hearses; those on the Long March: all those who together are the frontier, forehead of man. Where the wilderness enters, the world, the song of the world. Akiba rescued, secretly, in the clothes of death by his disciples carried from Jerusalem in blackness journeying to find his journey to whatever he was loving with his life. The wilderness journey through which we move under the whirlwind truth into the new, the only accurate. A cluster of lights at night: faces before the pillar of fire. A child watching while the sea breaks open. This night. The way in. Barbarian music, a new song. Acknowledging opened water, possibility: open like a woman to this meaning. In a time of building statues of the stars, valuing certain partial ferocious skills while past us the chill and immense wilderness spreads its one-color wings until we know rock, water, flame, cloud, or the floor of the sea, the world is a sign, a way of speaking. To find. What shall we find? Energies, rhythms, journey. Ways to discover. The song of the way in.

The young men ride their horses fast on the wet sand of Parangtritis. Back and forth, with the water sliding up to them and away. This is the sea where the goddess lives, angry, her lover taken away. Don’t wear red, don’t wear green here, the people say. Do not swim in the sea. Give her an offering. I give a coconut to protect the man I love. The water pushes it back. I wade out and throw it farther. “The goddess does not accept your gift,” an old woman says. I say perhaps she likes me and we are playing a game. The old woman is silent, the horses wear blinders of cloth, the young men exalt in their bodies, not seeing right or left, pretending to be brave. Sliding on and off their beautiful horses on the wet beach at Parangtritis.

On my desk there is a stone with the word “Amen” on it, a triangular fragment of stone from a Jewish graveyard destroyed many generations ago. The other fragments, hundreds upon hundreds, were scattered helter-skelter, and a great yearning, a longing without end, fills them all: first name in search of family name, date of death seeks dead man’s birthplace, son’s name wishes to locate name of father, date of birth seeks reunion with soul that wishes to rest in peace. And until they have found one another, they will not find a perfect rest. Only this stone lies calmly on my desk and says “Amen.” But now the fragments are gathered up in lovingkindness by a sad good man. He cleanses them of every blemish, photographs them one by one, arranges them on the floor in the great hall, makes each gravestone whole again, one again: fragment to fragment, like the resurrection of the dead, a mosaic, a jigsaw puzzle. Child’s play.

A- round my neck an amu- let Be- tween my eyes a star A ring in my nose and a gold chain to Keep me where You are *