In the Easing of the Spring

As February drifted shut,
I startled awake to find
My heart, leering over me,
Clutching a notched
And twisted knife;

Word of my plan
To disassemble and order its parts,
To polish this and rearrange that,
And so on and so forth,
Had reached it -

Screeching, outraged, it reared up,
Armed with barb and blade long honed,
Allied with my Vichy mind,
Arrayed against defenses long dulled,

It swarmed forth,
Sworn to guard
Its every blot, root, worm, and dreg -

God of heaven and earth,
By strong, bared arm and furious light
Fight for me, or I die.

Glory

By dusk
The cross is dust,
A smudge on my forehead
A stranger kindly
Tells me is there,

Smeared by wind,
Oils of skin,
And the delicate sweat of a heated office;

Indeed I am dust
If donning the ashes
Feels like penance;
I am possessed
By what They might think;

And every Lent, whatever I elect
To forswear
Demands to be eaten, done, or seen
A thousand times more urgently -
It seems I stretch
For the knotholes and chinks
In any fence I erect,

And every Lent, I think,
"Why all this fasting,
Why the ash?
We know how this ends." -

Because Christ wept just
Before raising His friend,
Because death goes down
With one Hell of a sting.

In the crosswalk
I pass a fellow penitent, death stamped
On his brow,
His head, perhaps, aching
In the throes of withdrawal;

The desert is peopled by nomads like us,
Pitching tents with shaking hands,
Mouths full of sand crying kabod!
Straining to see, by fire or cloud,
God.

Winter Haiku

I am Cicada,
Itching to shed this brittle
Straightjacket, winter.

Layover

The plane

Shuddered,
Collected itself, exhaled, and
Gulped in the sharp-chinned
Pittsburgh man

Who chose us, 

Baby notwithstanding,
Wedged to the window,
And ordered a beer. Vegas
Had left him

A little drunk, and sad, as it made him
Think of his wife. "We had twenty years,"
He said to my husband,

Whose shoulders guarded me trying to nurse,
Whose neighborly chat brought to the surface
The odd flotsam of a stranger's life,
Which he held out,
Coughing:

His long blank as he rummaged the basement
For one instructor's name, who had downed
A Cessna, taking his whole family with him;

The whisper of his wife's taped picture from the billfold:
"I washed it," he told us
And her,
Apologetic;

The habit
He regretted
Wafting off his skin, his coat,
Engulfing the aisle;

He made our daughter smile:
Blue slits, fierce in the canyoned face,
Peered through fingers like prison bars
Nobbed with gargoyle knuckles.

We made him wish to start over.
He made us wish for him: love,

And for ourselves,
Behind Matthew's shoulders,
I prayed for twenty,
And twenty,
And twenty more,
And twenty more after that,

And still it will not be enough.

Some Poems from Advent

Quotations from Isaiah, translated into poetry.

Day 3

Lucid galaxies, Creator's tongue,
Twist in the canal and break on the drum,
Garbled in doubt. A sham, our sight - a dying star
Takes in less, and sends out more
Light.

Day 4

Flip, we fling rote worship
At the sky to flatter God - 
Our lives belie our lips; 
Bankrupt of awe,
We bate a Lion.


Day 7

For eventually
Even the Dipper will mold,
Orion will find that his bow-arm shakes,
The Scorpion will stumble, growing frail;
And the Sisters, first one, then another,
Will wither and fail,
Tumbling from their stage -
It will rot and tatter, too, the sky,
And fold.

Get Some Rest

Are you tired? Yeah, me too.

Little stuff is going to feel like a bigger deal today. Patience might be brittle, feelings fragile, the future bleak or just blank. And we probably won't be the brilliant conversationalists we usually are.

Sometimes the fatigue is a physical ache.

Conversely, the morning after the first deep sleep in a long time, I feel like myself, and capable of anything. 

I wonder if it's like this in the spiritual realm: in order to be fully awake to what God is doing in our lives, we also need deep rest. 

Rest from trying to control our circumstances. Rest from earning approval and managing our images. Rest from chasing significance; even rest from hard spiritual labor. Time to stretch out, curl up, flop over onto the belly, and pause the earnest prayers, the in-depth study, the faithful-servant acts. To deeply rest in His arms as my baby rests in mine: still at last, just breathing in and out, smiling groggily up at our God.

"Come to Me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest."

I don't know if God is going to give you a good night's sleep or a chance to nap today. He doesn't always precede our productivity with rest (gonna have to have a talk with Him about that.)

But He does promise to be sufficient for what you're going through - even the suffering of fatigue. If it helps, He's been exhausted too. He gets it.

If nothing else, we can take the rest He is always offering us: rest from sin, the heartbreaking evil without and within, and rest from trying to earn His smile. God is already smiling down at you, full of understanding, bursting with love. May He be your rest today.

Although Gloria Steinem Would Surely Not Approve

When lines come clean to me,

Clear-eyed and whole,

Confessing prophecies and secrets I hadn’t

Known that I knew, and I let them go

To rinse another diaper and hang up the rest,

And make the bread –

Earthen warmth rising to the roof,

Crisp sunflower seeds and brown wheat

Held together by water and salt,

And yeast like the kingdom of heaven itself,

Anointed in butter and baked while I fold –

Do the untold stories drift away, wistful,

Like strangers at the final recital

Of a choir in which they once bandied about bass notes,

Trading cough drops and hymnals –

Too long ago now, and now nobody knows them,

And they quietly slip

From the church, unmissed?

Or is this

A new manuscript?

Families have stomachs and souls to be fed.

Meter: I sway my daughter to sleep.

Linens are lines;

Clean dishes rhyme;

Along with the plot, the gravy thickens;

I write four stanzas of rosemary chicken;

A poem may be eaten as well as read.