As you well know, I have been trying to focus on the presence of signifiers–the feral blender noises the dogs make when they are behind the dark door–the way the clouds pool and furl in beautiful splendor–let us say our daily prayers
Swap the signifiers
Killer clouds for beautiful dogs
This savage world/all ripped to pieces
While the light of one ordinary star is enough to
Remind me
Just how good you are
At holding on to me
All the same.
Oh howl, my intemperate soul–
Until it was too late
I did not realize who it was
Singing on the porch each night.
Thought it was a frog or a night bird
Not this perfect little cup-sized creature
I have no place to go to speak my grief
Only the knowledge that it is me and my kind who have
Ritualized the extraction
out, out
of each small, indelible singer
Leaving us to mother
Regret instead.
What happened to me, that in a moment of gargantuan hubris, I smudged it out? So what if it lived in the books or the play things? So what if it preferred the damp and closeted nocturne?
The moment before it was a glinty, wriggling alive
Then it was just an undoable regret
A life I should not have taken
We all have them–
Our ghosts, the ones we wish we could
Bring back whole
A parade of The Returned–
Uriah, John the Baptist, Stephen, Joan of Arc
Leaping and unfettered procession
Amidst the boundless sea of
The Redeemed
these trees of life
I could be a quark or an hurtling star,
A duck or a chicken
Living on one side of a beat-up plank fence
With knots in it, and scooped out holes
Signifying they all used to be trees
and the fence and the yard and the girl are just
Another kind of spaceship
Prone to sunset
Nothing can stop the Splendor from breaking through
Every hole in the fence.
John 4:12 KJV
[12] Art thou greater than our father Jacob, which gave us the well, and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle?
I have sat in the noonday sun with these two people for hours here and there over the course of my own friendship with the Man in the story.
He could have just answered her–
Yes!
You betcha!
Absolutely!
But he knows I will be listening, that others will be listening so..
John 4:13-14 KJV
[13] Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: [14] But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.
A person cannot go wrong with living water.
But it is worth noticing the question she asks–
Is Jesus more powerful than Jacob?
Strange to think of all the days when
The hope of Mankind hinge on the Jacobs of history.
When Jesus was coming
The Breaker
The strong right arm of God
The one who makes all other heroes look
Like chumps and losers
Jesus–
Living Water
It’s not rocket science, I tell myself, still present with my former self in the iterations of the supplication–old and unglamorous skills get unfolded like the swords beaten into plowshares.
Or the plowshares years later, back into
Swords where there might have been a daughter or two
You know I would have took that many and more
Or tried to sow or shape them from whatever you can make into a girl
Not dragons, not the teeth of dragons
But words stronger than all of my
Misgivings
Isaiah 55:11-12 KJV
[11] So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. [12] For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
I pretend the river is bottomless because I cannot see it to the end
Because, so blue
when I come up for air she asks–does it get all of its color from the sky?
Hold this
river in your cupped hands
Until night falls on us all
I have never been a roller coaster girl. Too queasy, but these days the ride is all mental grit and actuarial tables–I stop in the credit union parking lot just as the preacher on the radio quotes Jesus–ask anything in my name and I will give it to you!
Ok, God, I tell Him, make those doctors brave
Could substitute kind, generous, humble, compassionate
Feels impossible, I tell Him then
He reminds me
Impossible
Is His specialty.
John 5:3-4 KJV
[3] In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water. [4] For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.
My first question for you is–do you believe there was an angel who came down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the waters?
So one person each time could be healed?
Crazy, right?
But no crazier than believing that Jesus healed the man who had been at the pool so long, who does not turn out to be the most grateful healed man.
I have skirted the issue of the angel at the pool for years, choosing instead to focus on Jesus and the man and the religious oligarchs who made it hard for Jesus.
I understand that angel complicates everything–messenger of God who brings some healing, brings some hope only
In a certain season.
Carrying Light 