All along they were
breaking, each bud
crowning into the bright
daylight of a new spring,
emerging from treetops like
feathers pluming out of caps,
green against the golden
halls of April.
In the woods on the longest day,
July sky filtered through
keyholes of clotted
maples, and the life of it all felt
nearer than skin, stretching
overhead and within me, a
pressing down and running over,
quiet like a memory. And now,
reverie at the heights of autumn
strips all the green away
to reveal the blood beneath.
Up on the old oak, the last leaf trembles,
vivid as a final garment sliding free,
wavering in shy silence,
xylans blushing at the
yearning caress of winter, the
zenith loveliest at the laying down.
I see them: alive and electric like the air, pinwheel boys revolving, perched on flimsy plastic sticks, crushed into the midway dust by clowns and fools and cliques alongside tacky blood-striped cones. A broken echo, silenced sob, and they lose the light they own; they fade, unplugged, descending like the coffin to the tomb.
I see them: poking fists through air, they float above the crowd, lifted by design, to lose the thrill of flight they’ve found. The salty crackle on the tongue, the thirsty watch the girls, their eyes are young, their aim is off, to throw the dart to pop the dream, to win the prize; he’s making speeches about things he doesn’t get, claims the mic and holds the hostage, wins the bet, the posturing back-alley bully boys whip the towel into a noose, dropping threats like cherry bombs, like never-men who never lose.
I see them: lonely ones who hold back tears so long they cannot cry, weeping ones who only ever weep, gentle ones who lie, lovers who kiss back the tears and hold them close beneath the stands, rejects trembling at a lead-clad look, hopefuls who have lived so little of what they read about in books, boys wheeled here in wagons, eyes wide at a world of flame, and sound and color, wearied by the same and sugared up and wailing, boys who dream and boys who wake, boys who scream and who can’t take it anymore, who throw rocks and bottles and bullets, and boys who lift glassy shields and lower masks, and boys who scatter words like bottle glass, who run the shards along their arms to prove they bleed boy-blood, red as the flag-stripe, the apple peel, the battered head, the lashed back, the balloon unwillingly released, vanishing into the east.
Do you see them? Dying boys reaching for life,
tender as tinder in the fire,
flickering out like sparks
above the pyre.
The lake is a glass dish and the sky rests in it, flushed and warm like fresh-baked bread, pillowy and dusted flour-white.
I lay back into it,
the hum in my ears
drowning out the static in my brain,
slowing my wayward heart
to stillness.
For here the bread is multiplied,
rising above as
the fish populate the depths below,
such small offerings
spilling over their bounds
into other worlds beyond my own,
and I would rest in it,
I would take and eat of it,
I would become one with it
if it meant the moment lasted longer,
The bales are plump and fragrant on the back of the field, like just-baked jelly rolls or chubby baby cheeks.
I bury my nose in the air and inhale, and plant a kiss on the cheek of the earth, who, for all its troubles, still grins with only two teeth and bestows on me the scent of newborn hay.
Why is it that I hold the spring in such suspicion? I have given up on the hope that life will lift up its tousled head and throw the covers back with a fruity yawn the size of an open grave. I am Midwestern enough to eye the sky and tut-tut about snow, to keep my coat on its hook by the door. I am wounded enough by the purloined promises of buds sewn shut to play the skeptic when they bloom.
Unbidden, then, this delight when the sun strikes my eyes, when the first great green middle finger pokes its way up through the sod. It’s been so long since last year that the first warm day smells of birthday cake, and the little things crinkle in the field like gift wrap.
And every murmur stills to silence at a single daffodilian bow crowning the package,
(for Palm Sunday, from my upcoming project WORDS FOR THE CHURCH)
“Trample our foes under metal-shod heel under ramrod doctrine and volumes of steel!” You are, too often, in our battle-blind sight, our war horse for nothing but wild-eyed fight.
But on this day
entry to the Holy City is unlike any rebellion,
heralded by children
paraded through palms.
Salvation is not by our swords, or woken by our wars,
and the power enters peacefully,
on the back of a young donkey,
as it entered years ago
on the breast of a manger.
The only blood spilt is of a servant King,
that His wakening children may ever rise and sing.
Lay your banners low at the sandal-shod feet of the Infant, the Infinite, the Shepherd, the Lamb. His Gospel is peace, and mercy toward man.
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time for war, and a time for peace…” Ecclesiastes 3:1, 8b
It’s on the days it flashes by in feeds that someone else has left us; on the days we remember those woven into eternity, a tapestry of the never-forgotten; on the days we debate over who’s lives really matter; on the days we forget it all or cannot stifle the memory, so we suffocate.
The end is always present in my flesh and in my blood, like the burgeoning beginning behind each closing eye — a familiar tingle up the spine when silence falls around me —
but it’s ever-presence doesn’t make each passage any purer. No, it’s all just slowly staining me like the wine within the glass, licking up the sides until it spills.
So I grieve again, I grieve. For what is earth except to teach us how to grieve?
I’ve been so long tending this old fire in my chest, that I forget what sparked it. But it still keeps me warm when I worry that I might someday be wrong.
I’ve been so long raging against things I couldn’t know, like a line of cleansing fire taking field and forest too, like a pyre for the witch, for the stranger, for the son.
I am angry at so many things and none of them at all. I can’t look straight enough along the lines to see the source. But I fear it’s nearer still than all of these.
ii. look, the sky
Look, the sky is unfolding like a magnolia blossom and the long tender ears of corn are reaching up and up to touch it, bounty to bounty, sea green to rose gold, but this idiot is driving five under in the passing lane.
iii. wrath is a man
Wrath is a man
who is righteous
but was just told
otherwise.
Wrath is a man
who has never
lost anything
until now.
Wrath is a man
who loves for
what he gets
not receiving.
Wrath is a man
on the brink of
seeing himself
for the first time.
iv. whales and worms
I am too easy with anger for someone with no control, like a prophet under a broad green leaf, hands extended in hope of brimstone warmth.
And the heat is in the word: the tip of a whip opening your cheek. How is it that I pierce this heart that I hold so close to my own, beating together after the blow? How is it that we ever recover from these wounds?
Sometimes it takes whales and worms, sometimes different words. Sometimes it takes long and lonesome to quench this flame until you matter more than me.
