Altar stripped this
God in retreat
Tag Archives: poetry
Dear St. Joseph
When I think of you,
I think of your troubled sleep
and many hard choices.
I see you at night
in the desert,
getting Mary to safety.
And later, again, the three of you in flight,
pyramids looming in the distance.
In all the Gospels you never once opened your mouth.
You didn’t have to. Your actions said it all.
For you were, as all could see,
faithful in all things.
You know I’m not, but would like to be,
so I ask, meekly, that you pray for me
that I might be
in more than just my mind.
A falling, her falling
Into space
wings extended
what’s left of her past
still unknown
An epic of little things, or, In the sun and out of the wind
With nothing but where I am, home,
for my destination, I forgo foes and
calamities for mild
surprises: ice and reeds and
sliding fowl,
a family afoot,
two dogs who join and guide me.
Mercy was a schoolyard word
Mercy was a schoolyard word,
the key unlocking the grip of the bully,
something I saw often enough
but normally (neatly, nimbly)
dodged myself. God did thus
himself a disservice, putting
his good word first in the
mouth of the enemy who demanded it –
of his victim no less.
And this was part of a larger pattern,
I saw, God betting on the wrong horse,
dumping his treasures in the mud,
thinking all-screwed-up might make
the good, the true and the beautiful
self-evident.
Oh I’ll admit:
I never see the truth better
than when I’m wrong
or love purity more
than when I’ve sinned.
So maybe this is just the way.
But why?
Why must dark
dress up our day?
To the divine railway engineer
Who would be verticaling
what horizontal was,
namely this track,
hooking a chain to the train
so we won’t fall
Psalm 151: Or, of broken women and a host of drug-addicted men
I don’t watch zombie shows but know something about what
emerges from thy dank wood in the boonies, Lord –
have as need be hid behind equal trees,
backing and circling ever outward, dodging
hands and cool blank eyes, upward yes
into the air, “free” of it all, now, over there.
But you, wide and ghostly, neither leave nor solve
but hang, steady as the mist, as drops on ferns,
spores of the underside, your heart
rotting out the log. Till when? – we change?
Your breath is gone, but hold it still.
For we’ll not, ever, no matter what we’ve got,
(hell if we will)
change.
Love keeps going down
Love keeps going down
to the lowest places.
Why not let it go,
I wonder,
but no.
You’ll have that too.
Insatiable
are You.
Weather report
I myself am that cloud
blotting God out,
the snow
drifting the fence
The Missed Tackle
How can all your life compress to a single moment
and all of it be air after all, you perfectly placed by your miss
to see every second of the consequence, your rival
(who you’d have dropped every other time
with ease) now galloping free, strutting in fact,
into the end zone with the prize –
all his life now made
in that one second
that was once
yours.
