77 Spirituality poems

spilling water from my back, you call and i come. that exhausted walk to reach you breathless and no i didn’t run to see you, i’ve been smoking too much, same thing. another awkward hug in the car as my face smashes your cheek that i can feel it leaving now is the saddest, a beautiful eruption you could have picked it off the tree and chowed but you weren’t hungry. feeling it dying away all day much worse than the straining against the leash, another gorgeous thing that should not have happened, gone again.

In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake. Who have taught us. Who have guided us. Who have sustained us. Who have healed us. Please heal the animals. In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake. Whom we have slaughtered. Whom we have feared. Whom we have caged. Whom we have persecuted. Whom we have slandered. Whom we have cursed. Whom we have tortured. Protect the animals. In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake. Whose habitat we have stolen. Whose territory we have plundered. Whose feeding grounds we have paved and netted. Whose domain we have poisoned. Whose food we have eaten. Whose young we have killed. Whose lives and ways of life we threaten. Restore the animals. In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake. Forgive us. Have mercy. May the animals return. Not as a resurrection but as living beings. Here. On earth. On this earth that is also theirs. Oh Great Spirit. Heal the animals. Protect the animals. Restore the animals. Our lives will also be healed. Our souls will be protected. Our spirits will be restored. Oh Spirit of Raven. Oh Spirit of Wolf. Oh Spirit of Whale. Oh Spirit of Elephant. Oh Spirit of Snake. Teach us, again, how to live.

Her eyelids were painted blue. When she closed her eyes the sea rolled in like ten thousand fiery chariots, leaving behind silence above & below a thousand years old. He stood beneath a high arched window, gazing out at fishing boats beyond the dikes, their nets unfurled, their offshore gestures a dance of living in bluish entourage. He was only the court’s chief jester. What he said & did made them laugh, but lately what he sometimes thought he knew could cost him his polished tongue & royal wig. He was the masked fool unmasking the emperor. Forget the revelation. Forget the briny sea. He had seen the ravishing empress naked in a forbidden pose. Her blue eye shadow. Aquamarine shells crusted with wormy mud. Anyway, if he said half of what was foretold, the great one would become a weeping boy slumped beneath the Pillars of Hercules.

One example of hierophany is the apparition of angels. This is a new word I overheard this morning. It occurs when the divine realm manifests — or the word intrudes — into our quotidian realm. The natural one, an untidy fleshliness of the ordinary. Or the sacred and profane is another way to say this. I asked whether it is a hernia, and the answer was no. A herniated condition is viscera on viscera — a disc, organs, the skin, or nerves. Besides, such a comparison would be profane. A figure of speech already exists, I said, in a hieratic silence of cursive writing long ago dead. Not long ago, those two phrases dwelled in separate worlds. I dare you to use the word hernia in a poem, said a friend. So I not only used the word, I invited God into language. Or God existed before language, while God is also the word. Remember, all theophanies are forms of  hierophany. However, the converse is not always true — not all hierophanies are theophanies — or God visible in our world.

In the suburbs on a bike path that in any other age would be a road roughed halfway through some dark wood’s listening heart two damp young men in suits sucked dry of light walk stiffly and uncertain round a bend in each left hand the black box of a book They see me then spread out to fill the way as sun blares down and dry May wind slaps cheap loose plastic cloth against their shins The thinner taller blond one greets me in an earnest tone these days not often heard and when I do not take his offered hand surprised he pulls it back by jerked degrees says

In the flame of the flickering fire The sins of my soul are few And the thoughts in my head are the thoughts of a bed With a solitary view. But the eye of eternal consciousness Must blink as a bat blinks bright Or ever the thoughts in my head be stilled On the brink of eternal night. Oh feed to the golden fish his egg Where he floats in his captive bowl, To the cat his kind from the womb born blind, And to the Lord my soul.

For Rabbi Berger, Beth El Synagogue, Durham North Carolina Bess was my gussy friend She always took care. From the friction Or could. a bell is something different. Altogether. Such costly errors Of the mind. Eso and exoterror Skeletons. The pink body Eating its shell. She had pleaded not to pick Up with the underneath Legs and all scrabbling. But the fluorescent tests Allowed for prepreception. Every ghost limb has a war story. But not every war story has a limb. Fifteen thousand candles are Little kittens. It's an exed out eye Thing for this one. Or in the rubble, an Oboe Tuned by the wind. Half of him is impounded In the tree folk Gemeinschaft Half of him is a city. If you call him in the forest You might get the gut side Vertiginous and quiver, Covered in vines and hair To camouflage What's on the inside that counts? What fixed and determinate story Hails from the forest these Fisted halls? Most of him is hanging in the tree you See blinking in the sunlight, such a drip. The rainwaiter tickles the private. Got to get it together. From formal folk Comes the shining.

The day was mild, the light was generous. The German on the café terrace held a small book on his lap. I caught sight of the title: Mysticism for Beginners. Suddenly I understood that the swallows patrolling the streets of Montepulciano with their shrill whistles, and the hushed talk of timid travelers from Eastern, so-called Central Europe, and the white herons standing—yesterday? the day before?— like nuns in fields of rice, and the dusk, slow and systematic, erasing the outlines of medieval houses, and olive trees on little hills, abandoned to the wind and heat, and the head of the Unknown Princess that I saw and admired in the Louvre, and stained-glass windows like butterfly wings sprinkled with pollen, and the little nightingale practicing its speech beside the highway, and any journey, any kind of trip, are only mysticism for beginners, the elementary course, prelude to a test that's been postponed.

The god in me does not honor the god in you. The god in you murdered me once, and once was more than enough. So the god in me, adept at keeping my nature warm and inspired to love the benign, now prefers the chilly air of indifference, something picked up like a virus from the most vicious of mortals. The god in me regards the god in you as suspect, though sad to say, it wasn’t always so. There were the generous days in the beginning, when every word was made flesh. In the beginning the gods in us were content to let us go on behaving like perfect mortals, which is to say imperfectly, which is to say with our tenderness fully intact: the good kind that let us gladly undress our trepidations, and pleasure our solitude into a blissful oblivion; and the bad kind— invisible woundings no compliment or hot kiss, no confession of the amorous could soothe for long. And then, when the mortals we were had done enough to remind us that to be mortal is to be susceptible to the secret agenda, the cruel caprice, the soft but eviscerating voice— “at the mercy of a nuance”— the god in you decided it was time to act. A dark god, in need of a human sacrifice, smoothly turning your back on the earnest and their pathetic pleas. So the god in me, no stranger to the aberrant and the abhorrent, now has no choice but to respond in kind. A pity, really, since it has been the dream of so many gods to find themselves in some quiet room, the burden of power slipped off and scattered like clothes across the floor, the light of late afternoon a kind of benediction, and everywhere the gratitude for the privilege of feeling almost human.

after Baudelaire Quiet now, sorrow; relax. Calm down, fear ... You wanted the night? It’s falling, here, Like a black glove onto the city, Giving a few some peace ... but not me. I think, well, almost everyone I know Loves to be whipped by pleasure—right, Killer?— As they stroll the boardwalk, parading their despair. So why don’t you come too? But instead, with me, Away from all these tattered ghosts leaning off The sky’s balcony like last year’s lovers; We’ll watch everything we regret step from the sea Dripping ... while the dead sun drags its arc Towards China. Shroud of my heart, listen. Listen— How softly the night steps toward us.