Clothed in Light

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The rain came down all day, in a dry and thirsty place

The rivers and gullies rose, brooked banks, flowed, opaque with runoff, to the sea

The little girl felt the weight of it all, no running across the bridge, no looking for turtles and treasury things

The kitchen dance party helped, and the toasted sandwiches

Thank you, God, for the gentle rain, the dappled night, and Dollar Tree ponchos

Which make us all shimmer like apparitions as we walk the dogs through, dark, light, shadow, puddles you can kick up into arcs with your bread roll clogs

Puddles so deep and wide a girl can see her own reflection in them

Reflection of Him (who made the water, who calls the rain)

Who calls us all to shine like this all the time

In the wedding clothes of Light

(Revelation 22

Central Texas)

Ascent

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Who questions the story? The strange-god-man beast? His labyrinthine abode? His carnivorous diet? The architect of his incarceration? The boy prisoner?

The last flight

wax and feathers, frenzied, ersatz wings

We all know this is not going to fly

But we proceed nonetheless

Watch them go in your mind, at least, father and son soar in the cloudless

sky where

All literary imagination and polytheistic scaffolding cannot stop the

Firmament from becoming thin and cold a million miles from the sun

Not hot at all, wings useless but intact

The boy would have died eventually, no doubt, but not from any hubristic ascent

No rather, the same things that tie us all to the ground

Aged and infirm

Dragging beautiful, insufficient wings across a sandy shore

This is the labyrinth

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First, there is a forgotten Grace—tie this end to the fastening nail, hold onto the string no matter what!—

lights along the highway, who else is up at this hour?

-unspooling like a fishing line—

Saviors, truckers, a rogue paper man, and someone buying ice

-who knows how long the journey-

Love songs and lighted windows

Make a map out of insomnia and vigilance

Lost phones and lost loves

Welcome to the labyrinth/ hold tight to the scarlet cord

Every word that proceeds from the mouth of God

Dissolved into Light

She says

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“That was too short!“

I tell her that it would have been longer if

She had been quiet faster

Will you write another one if I am quiet? She asks

Hard to, nay impossible to,

Say no

Beautiful mockingbird

Origami daughters

Their hair ribbons of color and light like their mothers

Were-are-will be

“nothing shall be impossible”

Wind! Birds! Mockingbird! Mother!

He is

The wind that shakes the trees, lifts the wings

Heals the world

(John chapter 3–all of it!)

The Persistent Song

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Like the scent of evocative perfume

The words lift across

Street in the heart

Of a town named for a long-shot Gospel writer

Words about finding love and fish in the oceans

Surprisingly geographically specific

Pacific Ocean…Indian Ocean

These similes for lost love

A thin, reedy, fearless voice

Neon lights

Somethings are lost in the now

Known only to the One who sees

The not yet the will be

Impossibles come true

One day we will all know

The words

Pareidolia

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Within days of the end of an era I lay beneath a cloudy night sky and drew faces from slow moving clouds and stars and planets

I resisted the urge to cup your face in my hand or bang the flats of my palms against the heavy plate glass of the cathedral

Yell your name

But I had to

Had to

Had to

Touch the hem of your garment

Pray you turn and say my name

The Frog King

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He would be

A lovely boy who lived

Close to the frog pond

The tadpoles would catch glimpses

Of him through the refractory waters

Walking to and fro in the cool of the day

But could they trust their love? How could they ever measure up?

How many froglings does it take to amalgamate

A suitable consort for a King?

All of them with all their hearts

Eyes fixed skyward

To see his face and speak at last in the tongues of

Men and angels

The Dark House

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I have not thought about the dark house in years.

There were roads not taken—a house in the woods, a beautiful Victorian with no yard, a dog-less condo.

When you are old you realize how much you did badly

So many regrets.

But not the landlady, not the note, not the conversation between the nice neighbor and the petulant four year old

Defiant on the roof of the porch when she should have been sleeping

Later, much later, she would sleep when she should have been

Defiant on the porch of the house

I pray the time machine prayer

Dear God, permeate the darkness, the loneliness, the horror, the nightmare, the hell the children went through

Let them sing in the courts of the Temple of God

Hosanna, hosanna in the highest!!

How to want…to be His friend

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You have to see past the blood—your own and his

The stinging sweat and the jeering crowds

The voice in your own pounding brain

Nay, voices—

Saying that no king of anything could die like this

Alone and vulnerable in the dumpster fire of all

You have to focus on his eyes

What he sees and what is reflected in them

Love beyond measure/sky without end

And you must listen to his voice

Agony is too small a word for what he has done for us

The fire of the wrath of a holy God

Substitutionary Everything

Nothing left without Him.