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Ritual

If God is the newest thing, the youngest
thing, as Meister Eckhart said, then look,
He’s here as my son hands baby Maggie
to the priest, who crosses her with water.
Like tic-tac-toe: she entered the O
of eternity through the mudroom of birth
and the next move is to X her fontanelle
with God’s good creature, water. See,
while she sleeps on, how fragile she is,
open to being pierced or blessed,
while outside the bright air trembles and a bell
starts clanging the whole sky to pieces.

To the Quaker statue in Fairmount Park

Forgive me, Toleration. Your name is spare and taut.
Yours is no stance of abundance, but today

your ideal seems barely achievable.
Send me a tightrope across this ravine

so that I may toe my way over to you.
I walk to where the water pools, slowed by a bend

in the Wissahickon’s path. The surface shows me
an upside-down world where bare branches reach infinitely

root-ward toward the blue center of earth.
I do not believe in any monstrous god

Where color is spare

Where color is spare
we are given shape
and shade. Angles matter,
the up-thrust of a rock,
the way horizons
map the earth even in the dark.

Early, in the stillness before birds,
we feel our way, knowing
the slick of floor tiles in
the bathroom, the jut of corner,
the slant of closet door,
its handle like a friend’s firm grip.

The reach for the railing
for confidence down the stairs.
The button to push to wake
the coffee maker.

A matins

Today the sun asked, the minute I woke up,
why should I have to startle him today?
To hang my crown, my afternoon torn cloak
over his little window on the universe?

But now the radiance smashes straight through.
Across the floor a new day opens, shatterings.
How tremulously the pieces stand on edge,
each gold circumference a cutting blade.

The pieces glisten, wait. When will we reach in,
you and I—and everyone we love—
to pick them up, assemble crookedness, take on
the always-new, wounded, wounding miraculous?