We used to speak of the thingification
of grace, which was a bad thing,
but now I think love,
to use its proper name,
is indeed a stuff,
weightless and invisible,
we can get our hands on.
It’s from where everything always is
and is flowing,
if we let it,
through us to all the rest
to give us and it
life.
Better this theology,
wrong as it may be,
than me and my will
manning up
to obey the law repeatedly.
And yes, you are
Tent of the world I pin down with
poems till wind lifts the first flap
and the pins pop and scatter,
the wind now all in all
Some years brown stands up, elbowing aside
the other colors, those
splashy failures of the papers still falling,
even here, even in this den of words.
Brown. Not yellow, not red, not gold. No,
don’t tell me you see them in me.
This time it’s brown:
Humble suitable reasonable plain old dependable
brown.
Not chestnut, not rust, not burnt sienna.
Brown.
While I was out looking
all these other
people came along
whose names I
never heard, their sound
being buried in my
own next word –
oh we’ll be galloping, galloping
high on our horse and absurd!
On your white porch fronting your dense
Catskill wood you’ll wander the mind backward
through the midnight ocean, the black
forest, golgotha, to, at last, our primieval
garden. You’ll wonder what went wrong.
Who’d mean to keep old God away? Not you,
though you did, as now, his cross but a
seesaw – up and down and nothing changed.
Our hook is hidden in no dancing fly.
It hangs above the water with no enticement but
impalement. Our strength is in stillness
and waiting.
Later you want for it to have
been something and meant something,
to have unfolded inevitably like
the glance the cup the door the kiss and the dream,
but for now all you have is
the want in later you want
If we don’t know what mix this is – we don’t –
we don’t stay but follow for where she’s left,
our cavity of wild becomes the world, but what
kind of world will it be?
For Anne Forest, and for Annegien Schilling
My heart has been troubled
with my wanting
it’s to be –
like moons and planets far away –
but who would go there?
One will one day I pray
go to scoop the lot of it,
retrieve it to twirl
again within me,
but that will be where it’s never been,
real smoke in the heart of Missoula.
Utrecht Journal 