77 Spirituality poems

Because it is a pearly evening I am sitting in the window reading a book I have read before. Branches emphasize their heft and sway over their shadows. Some kind of extra firmament, an ear over the earth's ear, extra, as language is to prayer. Narratives of elsewhere: in the eye inside my eye that vision makes when you tell it to when you shut your eyes so hard they hurt you get more vista and less twist of road, and then you're looking at a valley you named yourself and irrigated yourself, full of bitterroot, magnolia in the clefts of rock, sage, at last a harvest, a desert that belongs to you— The trick to renunciation is starting now. The secret of detachment is having already given up, a transcript of speech whose cadences are lost, the human need for a body to fill in all your body's deficiencies, those clefts and dents already given up, the narrative of a life completely altered in the retrospect that knowledge brings and so discredited the point of memory utterly lost. That piece of land has always been suitable for a house. That nest has never been ready for eight baby birds who, top-heavy, frightened their own branch and home and scared themselves completely and remarkably away. Do you hear that? It's the wind negotiating the spine of one leaf it cannot decide whether to raise a fragment of an inch. Duncan writes as a reader struggles with a strong sentence, I struggle at certain unmistakable times with what's furtive and most right. When people marry they finish their names. I am still listening for mine to begin. My spine wants a bicycle to order its work, a red bicycle, a hill into a heart of a city that holds something I want. The pattern of the air around that leaf is like someone tracing my ribcage with his index finger and then walking away. Who can blame us for wanting other worlds, but shall we take them, or let them come to us? Is the spirit just an ear more like a mouth that bites the air and turns it into blood? A voice in the next room goes to sleep. Sleep moves in the branches of the oak become a rootless mass unsung by skeleton or name or height. My friend who says she does not believe in Paradise believes in rest: I believe that, or more likely I like to think of her, the way she held my name in her small mouth, as she held her own name. I like to think of anyone who on a night like this would reach towards my ribcage and trace it delicately and walk away.

Sunday, 12 May 1833 The clouds are marshalling across the sky, Leaving their deepest tints upon yon range Of soul-alluring hills. The breeze comes softly, Laden with tribute that a hundred orchards Now in their fullest blossom send, in thanks For this refreshing shower. The birds pour forth In heightened melody the notes of praise They had suspended while God’s voice was speaking, And his eye flashing down upon his world. I sigh, half-charmed, half-pained. My sense is living, And, taking in this freshened beauty, tells Its pleasure to the mind. The mind replies, And strives to wake the heart in turn, repeating Poetic sentiments from many a record Which other souls have left, when stirred and satisfied By scenes as fair, as fragrant. But the heart Sends back a hollow echo to the call Of outward things, — and its once bright companion, Who erst would have been answered by a stream Of life-fraught treasures, thankful to be summoned, — Can now rouse nothing better than this echo; Unmeaning voice, which mocks their softened accents. Content thee, beautiful world! and hush, still busy mind! My heart hath sealed its fountains. To the things Of Time they shall be oped no more. Too long, Too often were they poured forth: part have sunk Into the desert; part profaned and swollen By bitter waters, mixed by those who feigned They asked them for refreshment, which, turned back, Have broken and o’erflowed their former urns. So when ye talk of pleasure, lonely world, And busy mind, ye ne’er again shall move me To answer ye, though still your calls have power To jar me through, and cause dull aching here. No so the voice which hailed me from the depths Of yon dark-bosomed cloud, now vanishing Before the sun ye greet. It touched my centre, The voice of the Eternal, calling me To feel his other worlds; to feel that if I could deserve a home, I still might find it In other spheres, — and bade me not despair, Though ‘want of harmony’ and ‘aching void’ Are terms invented by the men of this, Which I may not forget. In former times I loved to see the lightnings flash athwart The stooping heavens; I loved to hear the thunder Call to the seas and mountains; for I thought ‘Tis thus man’s flashing fancy doth enkidle The firmament of mind; ‘tis thus his eloquence Calls unto the soul’s depths and heights; and still I defied the creature, nor remembered The Creator in his works. Ah now how different! The proud delight of that keen sympathy Is gone; no longer riding on the wave, But whelmed beneath it: my own plans and works, Or, as the Scriptures phrase it, my ’inventions’ No longer interpose ‘twist me and Heaven. Today, for the first time, I felt the Deity, And uttered prayer on hearing thunder. This Must be thy will, — for finer, higher spirits Have gone through this same process, — yet I think There was religion in that strong delight, Those sounds, those thoughts of power imparted. True, I did not say, ‘He is the Lord thy God,’ But I had feeling of his essence. But ‘’Twas pride by which the angels fell.’ So be it! But O, might I but see a little onward! Father, I cannot be a spirit of power; May I be active as a spirit of love, Since thou hast ta’en me from that path which Nature Seemed to appoint, O, deign to ope another, Where I may walk with thought and hope assured; ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!’ Had I but faith like that which fired Novalis, I too could bear that the heart ‘fall in ashes,’ While the freed spirit rises from beneath them, With heavenward-look, and Phoenix-plumes upsoaring!

it is essentially reluctance  the language a darkness, a friendship, tying to the real but it is unreal the clarity desired, a wish for true sight, all tangling ‘you’ tried me, the everyday which caught me, turning the house in the wind, a lovecraft  the political was not my business  I could not look without seeing the decay, the shit poured on most things, by indifference, the personal power which is simply that,     demanding a friend take dullness out of the world  (he doesn’t know his lousy emptiness)                      I slept in a fire    on my book bag, one dried wing of a white moth     the story is of a man who lost his way in the holy wood because the way had never been taken without at least two friends,  one on each side, and I believe my dream said one of the others always led     now left to acknowledge, he can’t breathe, the darkness bled the white wing,     one     of the body of the moth that moved him, of the other wing,     the language is bereft

for John Gardner It was not kindness, but I was only buckle-high in the door. I let him in because the knock had come, the rain clawed each window and wall. I was afraid. Climbing down the stairs I did not know how my country, cunningly, had rotted, but hear, now, my steps creak in memory and the rocks let go in the blind nightglass where you get up, frightened, to reenact the irrational logic of flesh. Even now I can’t see why it happens, the moment of change, but must try to witness each particular index of landscape and irony of promise. I know I was a child when the banging began, sleepless with every light in the house blazing. Then the man whose speech entangled me came in from the mud-world. He could not put together the clear words of hope we dream, only the surge of a river. He, who said it wasn’t a fit thing for anyone, half-grown, to have to imagine in this godforsaken life, said there was a message, the river high, no chance. I remember the wind at that door breaking like a father’s hand on my face. Such hurting does not cease and maybe that is why the man went on fumbling for love, for the loving words that might be knowledge. He gave me this message. I took it, and took, without warning, grief’s language that piece by piece has shown me how to connect dreamed moments skidding like rocks in the silence of a Wyoming midnight. Each of his rainy words, fragments of the old sickness, passed into me, then he was gone, miserable and emptied, and I had no home but the heart’s hut, the blistering walls of loneliness, the world’s blue skymiles of longing. Common with drowned fir and uncoiling crocus, then, I walked in ignorance and entered this terrible life that was always a dream of the future in the relentless unsleep of those who cannot remember the last thing they wanted to say: that love exists. And in darkness you have dreamed me into your world with their message, their words whispering an hour before black, sudden knocking that, even as I recall it, begins in your heart’s meat to reverberate, oh, its noise is going to wake you like a dove’s desire. This is the dream of the soft buckling of flesh, the beautiful last erosions, and I swear I would give up these words if I could, I would stop the code of that streetlight just beyond your bed— but it is too late, for the secret of hope swells in you and who can stop the news that already screams like the roof’s edge leaving its nails over your child’s bed that is, now, splintered and empty as every moment skidding at the back of your neck? Leaves not a month old hurl out of the storm and steady splatter of time, and tomorrow will lie still ripening, but only long enough for you to catalog, in dream, what was possible before the rake must drag its scritch-scratch over ground. All I ask is that you turn to the child inside, those words dreaming and changeless as love’s last chance—let them be said against whatever, crying in the night, we still think may be stopped, the black historical fact of life’s event crashing, like a wall of water, over the actuary’s lawn and yours. You have seen me before and would not hear, stung by your wife’s fierce beauty, when I called your name, and the day your mother died I begged your attention and got your dollar. I followed you once, in New York, like truth, always to give you the message, and now on your porch, mud-spattered, I am knocking to make you see what love is. Call your wife, the police, anyone you like, for everyone is waiting. We don’t mean to be unkind but are compelled to deliver, faithfully, the words that have been fluttering in your ear like a scream. It is not the wind waking you, but the low roar of years fumbling to tell you what has happened, or will, when the door flies open and the naked message of love stands there stuttering in your face, alive, crying, leaving nothing out.

National Portrait Gallery I have a need to see the painting when no one is looking. The god- thought if there was such a thing, inconsolable, of Saturday reaching for Sunday to ride out onto the Indian Ocean like an argument of starched waves in their coffin-white lace I might finger as I pass. There are hands in the paintings: raised, pointing, folded, reaching, reaching    ...    there’s a leporello book intended for my ex-lover’s breathing, weather balloons like colored severed heads laughing their way up the sky’s fever-continuing threshold of three miles withholding this formula for desire. Beside the one body and its skying figures of speech, night’s impressionist-flecked mask captured by singing: try to inhale. And again, please. Cough up cadmium twice, suddenly. Carry the caraway seed page away, fill your sea purse head with the tiny unborn. Painting, like digging up your garden in the dark, isn’t spring. Isn’t daddy root, mama bud pullulating for some creation. Isn’t spring. Isn’t season’s salt measure for your worth. Whoever told you that lied about what’s to be framed next.

This guy I know, a rabbi, Friday nights, on his way home before sunset in winter, always stops at a florist or bodega and buys a bunch of flowers for his wife. Every week the same, a ritual, regardless of her mood that morning, fresh upsets at work, or snarling on the bridge; he brings her roses wrapped in cellophane. But isn’t there a ring of hokiness in that? Why should a good man have to show his devotion? Some things go unspoken; some things get tested on the real world, and isn’t that the place that matters most? So when you told me I should bring you flowers, I joked, “But don’t I show my feelings more in dog walks, diapers, and rewiring lamps?” The flowers, I learned later, weren’t for wooing, not for affection in long marriage, but for something seeded even deeper down, through frost heaves, and which might be, roughly, peace. (It’s funny that I just assumed romance.) Now there’s no peace with us. I wonder what they might have meant to you, those simple tokens, holding in sight what no rite can grow back.

the afterworld sea there was a water song that we sang when we were going to fetch river from the river, it was filled with water sounds & pebbles. here, in the after-wind, with the other girls, we trade words like special things. one girl tells me “mai” was her sister’s name, the word for “flower.” she has been saving this one for a special trade. I understand & am quiet awhile, respecting, then give her my word “mai,” for “water,” & another girl tells me “mai” is “mother” in her language,& another says it meant, to her, “what belongs to me,” then “belonging,” suddenly, is a strange word, or a way of  feeling, like “to be longing for,” & you, brother, are the only one, the only one I think of  to finish that thought, to be longing for mai brother, my brother

This face had no use for light, took none of it, Grew cavernous against stars, bore into noon A dark of midnight by its own resources. Yet where it lay in sleep, where the pillows held it With the blind plaster over it and the four walls Keeping the night carefully, it was undone. Sixty-watt light, squared to a window frame, Across a well of air, across wind and window Leaped and made shine the dark face in its sleep.

She thinks it wants to kill, this wind, the wind with no mind—a transference to everything out there. Because she needs waking, the howling is meant to wake her, a self crying underneath her sleeping self, the stilted house groaning on the edge. For how many days now this dominating sea? Wind so absolute it rides the rain sideways and up, crashing out far beyond her until the anchor breaks away— waves take possession, smash the boat on concrete pilings. But isn’t this what she came for?

My objectives this morning were vague. As always I'd hike these hills— a way to keep going against the odds age deals, a way to keep body and soul together, and not so much thinking as letting things steal into mind— but I started counting from the very first step I took. I wore rank old boots, ill-laced, and patchwork pants. Around my neck hung the frayed lanyard of a whistle I use to summon our trio of dogs, who capered and yelped their pleasure at one of our walks, and more miraculous still, at having me for a master. It's true in a sense that I always count as I wander, though it's usually the beats of a tune (Thelonious's "Blue Monk" a favorite) that mark my time. These counts felt odder, better. We scattered a brood of grouse at step 91. The deerflies strafed us. At 500 a late trillium glowed by a ledge like a lotus. Right along the rain kept pounding. I was mindful of all these things but I never stopped counting. Life was good, and more. It was worthy of better response. At 1000 I thought, Enough—and counted on. Nothing was coming to mind. Nothing is coming again from my hike half the day ago with three dogs through rain but a mystic sense of well-being in quietly chanted numbers. Whatever this trance, I treasured it as a wonder not to be wrenched into meaning, as in Every second counts, as in You should count your blessings, though of those there seems no doubt.