The metal doors are the only punctuation Between Caution and Horses going south as the great, white wings are bourn up the coast
Why are the giants stilled? The wind is alive and there are no Quixotic figures on the horizon
We sing sad love songs
As the wind unfurls ribbons of smoke from engulfing flames
We go to the sea
For weeks now I have watched the tree thirst to death, unable to tell it that there is very little hope. Its auburn hair has cascaded around us, weeping, and I have felt both inadequate and way too nonchalant.
So I crafted a fictional me who did all the desperate things the real one should–buy yards and yards of burlap, soak the naked roots with water scooped from the river, gather the seedlings, cut careful branches and apply growth hormone to them, explain all this to the dying tree
The real tree gestures up to the mother tree, deeper into the soil, the manicured lawn, sources of man-made hydration.
And then down to the clay and rocks, blanketed now in the reddish needles, strange nourishment
sufficient to grow
Saplings
once she has gone
She flaps her (flightless) wings and flutters about
Because surely birds can’t cry and this world is full of sorrow
She is almost human, fully sentient with the wary eyes of someone who knows what it is to not have opposable thumbs
So I tell her, do your graceless angry dance and I will translate for you
About how eternal we are in this brutal place
Where the stars tell us things in the darkness
About hope
Dammed hope
Which will one day soon
Break free
The bald cypress
Is just a tree
A single tree on a riverbank where
Autumnal colors signify slow, thirsty death from the bridge to the broken
Dam
They try to tell us they are dying with a bride’s train of leaves blown out on the current
Stronger now that the dam has broken
The world has always been this way they will tell you
As if that would be enough
For you, for me
What if you believed?
That the trees were all sentient beings
And their falling leaves were thirst-stricken em•is•ar•ies?
Curling boats cupped and lovely
Or spare, lacy things let go before they should
To
The rippling surface of sunlit, unexpected
Apocalypse.
I break the second commandment all the time, sow dragon’s teeth in this suburban front yard, draw the greenest leaves down and through my fingers loosing embryo acorns and the shifting compass of the setting sun. It is the girls who say these most beautiful things, white linen things pinned to a line and lifted by the wind beneath a slivery moon
“It looks like a stone rolled away
Like a stone in the very act of being
Rolled away”
Matthew 2:1,2 and 28:1,2
What if all that was left was
Bad love songs?
You would say
Fold them, Darling, fold them all into
Flocks and flocks of perfect
Origami birds
Ink dot eyes unblinking, still
As they wait as long as it takes to hear
The bridegroom’s voice
Calling them to wing, to rise
Yep, I know-who?
Bear with me.
Ten years ago we discovered that our adopted son had molested some of his siblings and their friends.
I went to my friend and asked him what I should do and he said,
The truth will set you free.
So I told people the truth
Church
Work
Neighbor
Community
Family
Truth
And most people stopped being our friends.
So not who, what
A good friend never leaves, never forsakes, never hides your sin, but doesn’t abandon.
Jesus is a good friend.
What is Love
What is justice
There were times we all faced this extreme solitude of the truth. People who had been out friends could not risk the chance that we were contagious.
But Jesus was always there, the sojourning older son, back from afar, standing on the other side of the street, in sight of the house, I-am-here-darling present with us
never alone because
What a friend we have in Jesus
Recently I have started “meditating” on the good friend. I put meditation in quotes because it can seem monastic and old fashioned, could just say thinking about.
But I say meditation because the particular focus for me is the life-long friendship God calls us to pursue.
God calls us to pursue.
What is a good friend?
Who qualifies as a good friend?
How does one be a good friend?
What do good friends do together?
How much time does good friendship require?
Is there a schlepping requirement?
All these things are on the big stone table of this miraculous friendship God has called me to through the doorway of Jesus.
Very Christiany, I know.
But then I also know I could not draw close to the Holy Divine if I did not have
A friend like Jesus.
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