When mountains crumble

Think about it.

Your darkest night

Your loneliest moment

The here-and-there times when it is either your own

Life or the life of the beloved

Taken from you

Faith I get

Love anchors

But it is my squint-into-the-sun-reticence about hope

Which drives me to speak

Of mountains.

Today darling the mountains

Are all shaped like crowns

Crowns of thorns or flowers,

The braided laurels of an imperial victory

He said, it is finished beneath these crumbling mountains

And I will wait, sometimes in tears

To see them all

Thrown into the sea.

The Invisible World

Not often enough

Do I think about the light I cannot see

The whole beings made of it who

Could be standing right beside me

defined by light not visible to me

Or smell, or touch or sound or taste

All senses which could be

Stronger somehow–

A male polar bear can smell a mate from 100 hundred miles away

Sharks can smell single droplets of

Blood in the water miles away

What portion of my human brain is cordoned off for

My sense of Love? How far, how long, how wide a net

Will you cast for me?

3.5

What if God were just twice as smart as you? Twice as nice. Twice as precise. Would you worry then, Darling?

Worry about the things He would tell you

Before, not after, the flood

The possibility of both

Righteous anger and a casual

Ordinary

Blast of glory

Refuting all the

niggling details of narcissism

And all your little monsters

Eyeing you hungrily from their corners

Waiting to take all

The clues, the love-notes, the blazing stars

He has strewn about this place

Only hope for

Ransom.

The Shining Path Ascent

Have there ever been friars here? Or caballos en el potrero, chico? I don’t know, I am afraid of this cathedral mountain, stone sacristy and holy of holies, a Wonder Wall above the pools, a picnic area where

Light would dwell

Among us

Who can dig and scrape and cajole this stone, this path? Light the wave, the pulse, the metaphor, the insistent presence, and somewhere, somehow we use it to call out to each other these great distances between

With news I do not want to substantiate

We will all break like waves

into light

The Vigilant Ones

If I were to write a book of fiction for my children I would construct people for them, community, a family, let’s say, a big, sprawling, messy family

Maybe they would live next to some kind of river

Maybe the dogs would talk or the fish would taste like brightly colored jello confections.

Or maybe these fictional people, these purely hypothetical people, would just be back up

The silhouetted figures you might see on the crest of the hill above the sycamore tree as the sun sets

After the dam breaks

When they-you-we

Might need the vigilant ones

The most.

You are eternal

Years ago a man who fought fire told me that the hot center of it is black, vortex dark, a hole you could fall into and never stop

Falling

There is no fire without burning, I tell the children, each sun a metaphor for something

Something bigger than us

Something bigger than them

Than all the worlds of burning

Light reaching back to us

Saying something

Maybe in Morse code

Flashlit messages exchanged through neighboring windows by children in the night

You are…eternal

You are eternal

The Last Normal Day

We are eternal, they are eternal, I tell her, but I know that there is something else, the purest kind of paradox, or is it tautology? Etiology? The woman in the park, on the streets, flagging down motorists, in the parking lots of churches, where people congregate like flocks of birds, always, always asking this uncomfortable question–

When was your last normal day? When was your last normal day?

When? When the truth

Stalks in

Wide awake