Words betray only the barest threads of love
“A mother for a child”
You must know I always
Wanted to keep the possessive
Pronoun “mine”
In our relationship
They took that from us
Let me see how
These tiny seeds of faith
Could move mountains
Losing sight of light to find it
Time makes
Trees from seeds/
Holes in the arms of love
I look for your face in every crowd
And the pictures you post to the world
Of a baby I once held
So dear, beautiful girl
So always, always dear
I tell
The young man that I have
Fallen a million times
(Felt like it anyway)
A million falls
A million failures
A million times
An arbitrary number
Not as funny as bazillions or gazillions
Arms spread wide to denote the bigness of the thing
God sent His one and only Son
…to fall like this?
Fail like this?
Criminal nailed to a tree?
His falling and my falling, so different
His fall just
To rise to life,
Me in His arms
when the King arises
He runs to us
These words, weapons, shields
Tokens of splendor
Silver refined in the crucible
(For what is crucible but a fancy word for Cross?)
Gold fired seven
Times this burning
Brighter than the sun
Distill this ghost of a man
Standing close to a lone Word
Strong enough
To call him from the grave
Back to life
never was
All that pretty
Never was
All that good
Never did
Believe in romance
Never will
Leave alone
I am grateful for the rain
On this dry patch of earth
I know the difference between
Accidents and miracles
And wish to thank
The God of ordinary sadness
Who sits next to me
on the sinking-in-the-middle
Patched-with-a-heart
-on-the-back
$35 couch
Willing to abide in the center
Of my vertiginous grief
He says
Take courage
It is I
Do not be afraid
I see him addressing
An undiluted crowd–
You are the light of the world
We are?
Sheep, maybe
Or chicken (I know my coward heart)
But surely not light
Too strong, too bright, too burning
We must burn on
This Mount of Olives
This Garden of Gethesmane
This history and geography of light poured out in the crushing weight
Upon olives rendering
Oil and salt rubbed on the skin of the newborn child
Anointing a king
The King
Of light
Who holds
Each burning
Coil of a star,
The core of fire within each churning planet
Our ordinary souls
In the palms of his stretched-wide
Hands
Maybe splendor
Is a girl
Rowing her younger brother to the
Far shore
She tells him she he will be
A cowboy there
He asks her how he can be
Without a hat
She tells him
you will make one
From the twigs and branches
And leaves there
And you will have a cow you will name Horse and another named Ted or Fred, he said
Yes.
She says, and a chicken…now get your clothes and race me up the hill.
A chicken named
Get-your-clothes-and-race-me-up-the-hill,
You were the one
To tell me all the others did it too
With a percentage
A statistic
Because it is the way you roll
50% percent, eh?
Half of all you knew.
I took the statistic to the source
Never got an answer.
Not surprised…
Inclined to believe they, like you
Would tell the students
And hell, eat your broccoli as well
As the water rises around us
To the end.
Go back
Go back to the place you lost
Your courage
The battle
The war with fear
People were never intended
to walk on water/
Raise the dead
It requires things of us
We do not possess
Gravity
A voice to calm the storm
And turn ghosts into this
Man who calms the sea
You used to stand
In the doorway of winter
Receiving the Russian men
With their flowers and words of love
As transparent as their motives
Never letting on
You were a sucker
For their swarthy accents and abundant facial hair
But not that much
That you would fail
To mark each hour of rising light
Not yet
The full Twelve
He speaks of so casually
Before dark.
Carrying Light 