Though some might think it heresy
I confess it troubles me that though
He said to those He led that a grapevine
can’t grow figs, isn’t that just what
we did, having turned His skin to white
and changed his sight—our blue-eyed boy
grafted to a Christian tree so even though
He did decree we love our neighbors as
ourselves, once we claimed Him for
our own, we turned His people into “them.”
A kind of tune, a music everywhere
And nowhere. Love’s long lovely undersong,
A trace in time, a grace-note in the air,
Borne to us from the place where we belong
On every passing breeze and in the breath
Of every creature. All things hear and fear,
For faintly, through our fall, we too may hear
The strong song of the Son that undoes death.
God came to me as a sign—more than letters—also, the veritable oak,
nailed as a single digit into the ground. I sit in church and what means to me
are rope-swags on white curtains, all the places where the up-lights peer
like eyes into a moving sheerness. And your tone, Pastor, when technology fails,
when the young girl with the same break in her back as you,
can’t produce the right YouTube video. We hold God in our bodies, in our voices.
We walk around taking Him with us: We are Church. We are Container.
care
to be
a shepherd, The Shepherd
to sheep
those foul, obstinate
foolhardy & dumbest of
creations by
His Heavenly Father
for example, their wool’s
a catch all
for everything
everso contradictory to
their very well-being
for near & dear
to them in their once
fluffy fleece
can be found the likes
and dislikes of
mud, burrs, sticks,
ticks, lice
and clotted manure,
The day I was confirmed, you turned to me,
sang out, while I stared straight ahead
through the sudden Wisconsin blizzard,
trying to keep our car on course toward home,
“Maybe this is why we got together.”
I thought that was too much hindsight, foresight.
Now, ten months into your death, our life
together winds and unwinds, spiraling,
snowdrifting, melting, freezing to melt again.
On the west wall of the room you smoked in,
coughed through, smoked, room I’ve had repainted
that blue the sky aspires to, our cross
Endless darknesses of deep space and sea
Verify something super holy’s going on
Even when your lost-in-the-middle life
Needs a shot of sanctity.
Take your mind, for instance.
How long has it been since a new note or color
Ebbed at the edges of it, or you
A fledgling hidden in an ancient tree,
Singing unseen and darkling to the stars,
The fount and spring of meaning, just upstream
Of every utterance, unsullied, free,
A prisoner who grips and bends her bars,
The one who begs to differ, dares to dream,
A child astray, still calling to your heart,
A pattern, personal as all the swirls
In fingerprints on hands that hands have held,
Wholeness that knows itself within each part,
A flag whose emblem every breath unfurls,
A chasm bridged, and an old heartache healed,
Dearest instar,
Larva of my own heart,
You, who have never been comfortable in your own skin:
For days, I have watched you
gnawing your way through my garden,
stripping the milkweed down to bare stems;
sloughing off your former selves,
those old and outworn garments,
trusting your hunger, your devouring need,
to be your guide and strength.
Letting down from the water-laden air,
the little fists of rain drum on
the skylight above our bed, imparting
their version of the truth of heaven.
I know that often the rain will
hold off, the grass darken and burn,
even the flies grow listless. And that too
is a half-heaven gift, calling us to be
more thankful when the heavy clouds
burst open over the fields, as a fresh and
fragrant cool sweeps in. We open our
windows. We breathe the change
that renews us.
With my last Amen, our soldiers left the shade
of the only tree that the artillery had spared
on the stump-studded hills rising all around us,
to return to their duty stations, and I began
removing communion elements and a wooden
cross and scarf from the still warm hood of my jeep.