Agere contra. —Ignatius of Loyola
God isn’t love or isn’t God. This is,
For doubt, its royal flush: God can’t be both.
I’m caught up in the logic and the mood,
Hemmed in by facts, one fact, the world’s abyss
Of suffering and injustice, how it’s loath
To love: no God or else one far from good.
“Tiny bees found in woman’s eye, feeding off tears” (CNN, April 10,
2019): “She thinks the insects blew into her eye at a relative’s grave
site when she visited it with her family.” Known as sweat bees, they
are attracted to the salt in human sweat.
Stranger than it appears,
four bees living off her tears
sought brief shelter in her eye
where they stayed, impossibly.
Before whose grave did she kneel?
What discomfort did she feel?
Specks of dirt she’d brushed away
seemed to linger stubbornly.
The therapist says to sit with your loneliness
and so I sit in the middle of my apartment,
walls of boxes around me, clothes
still lodged in trash bags two months in.
I think of how everything is a metaphor
for acceptance. Brush past the feeling
but do not face it yet. The therapist tells me
that everything is a repetition, but I take it
to mean that every minute is a chance
to relive losing. So I practice driving
slower than the speed limit, letting
the night enter through the open windows.
Isaac without spot or blemish
about to be slain lay
there
before Him
trussed up, in trust
his father’s arm poised
the death angel
hovering near, thoughts
racing, fear of
the known, and the unknown;
but neither squirm, nor blanch
did I see
in Him pinioned there, nary
a tremble in His lips
while He looked upon
His stabat mater . . .
While
to me He whispered His
job-like words
: though He may kill Me
yet will I
This morning it was fluency,
the title of a poem I found in a book
I laid aside so I could write this down and find
myself inside generous syllables rippling along
waters leading somewhere hopeful I am sure
like a readiness of well-being or forgiveness, and just now
the face of the woman who had wronged me bitterly
came to my mind and in place of my common anger
this time I felt only the residue of her own wounding
and my heart, its jagged edges closer to smooth.
Unspecific guilt
(He chalked it up to old age)
Pursued him full tilt,
As storm winds bear down
On the defenseless outskirts
Of a struggling town
Miles from anywhere.
Not something he talked about.
No cause for despair:
Sins, sure, although none
Outside the ordinary,
Things most all have done.
January day,
Late afternoon, cold, windy,
Sun sinking away—
Too late now to change.
The thought hit hard. First, panic.
Then, a flood of strange
Out of the wilderness came this prophet of fire
and repentance, his voice a flame igniting
souls out of darkness to witness the Messiah.
Wherever he went bonfires reddened the night air.
He wore a tunic of camel hair, and a rope
cincture binding unruly flesh from
appetite; he lived on locusts and burr-
nested cones. When he entered the Jordan