Selected Poems

WITHOUT CEREMONY

Except ourselves, we have no other prayer;
Our needs are sores upon our nakedness.
We do not have to name them; we are here.
And You who can make eyes can see no less.
We fall, not on our knees, but on our hearts,
A posture humbler far and more downcast;
While Father Pain instructs us in the arts
Of praying, hunger is the worthiest fast.
We find ourselves where tongues cannot wage war
On silence (farther, mystics never flew)
But on the common wings of what we are,
Borne on the wings of what we bear, toward You,
Oh Word, in whom our wordiness dissolves,
When we have not a prayer except ourselves.

IN CONSOLATION

Do I love you? The question might be well
Rephrased. What do I love? Your face?
Suppose it twisted to a charred grimace.
Your mind? But if it turned hospital cell,
Though pity for its inmate might compel
Sick calls from time to time, I should embrace
A staring stranger whom I could not place.
So, cease demanding what I cannot tell

Till He who made you shows me where He keeps you,
And not some shadow of you I pursue
And, having found, have only flushed a wraith.
Nor am I Christ to cleave the dark that steeps you.
He loves you then, not I--Or if I do,
I love you only by an act of faith.

FOR INSTRUCTION

Teach me some prayer
tender as you are tender when
one of my shadows mingles with one of yours and makes
an intricate weave we walk on for a moment,
gentle as you are gentle when
you humble yourself to take my kiss,
wordless as we are wordless when
a pause has fallen between us like a petal.

ON THE EXAMINATION TABLE

My eyes, two birds
crazily threshing
in the trap of their sockets,

my tongue, dry leaf
ready to fall
to the pit of my throat,

my breath, fragile moth
caught in a cave-in
of my gullet's tight tunnel,

my belly, overturned turtle,
stripped from the shell
of daily decorum,

my body, dull dog,
shies into terror's
mythical monster.

RAISON D'ETRE

I grow from my poems
in a green world.

Outside them I suck by breath,
grow pale and poor.

For I am the toad
in my imagined garden.

HERE IS A WRITER

confined to a rectangular room
four
blind
walls
white dead white;
given forty two tiny picks
with which to hack out innumerable windows
onto the world

ON NOT BEING ABLE TO WRITE

I have always lived
within my words
as a soul
inhabits a body

But now if you come
to see me, you
will not find me
here at this address.

And my words will seem
like so much lumber
lying scattered
from a house demolished,

the boards and bricks
to be employed
for purposes
other than love's.

AGAINST SUDDEN DEATH

I do not fear my death so much
as that perhaps he may surprise me,
like an alarm going off in the morning

which, though I know it's coming, startles me
here in my state of cloudy waking
just so my death sits down a moment,

shunning dramatics, heavy-handed acts
like pain, of course; above all, having,
my Lord an appropriate bedside manner,

taking my hand to take my pulse down, down,
and down, and so, if friends exclaim,
"She looked the picture...What a shock it was!"

It would have shocked me more than them except
for those few bitter words, or sweet,
we shared, my death and me, the other night.

THE LONELY CHILD

is an explorer
in his desert blossoming
rose in a mirage;

a miner digging
his dark, chasing golden glints
from a bright pebble;

a peasant naming
sweet declensions of his flesh
though he cannot read. [End Page...