Stones of the Field
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Prelude
Church or sermon, prayer or poem:the failure of religious feeling is a form.
The failure of religious feeling is a formof love that, though it could not survive
the cataclysmic joy of its inception,nevertheless preserves its own sane something,
space in which the grievers gather,inviolate ice that the believers weather:
church or sermon, prayer or poem.
Finer and finer the meaningless distinctions:theodicies, idiolects, books, books, books.
I need a space for unbelief to breathe.I need a form for failure, since it is what I have. [End Page 1]
Somewhere This Side of Sanity
Somewhere this side of sanitylet me have one glimpse of you God.
I have grown tired of gazing at the seams in things,believing that there are seams in things,
that all reality is ventilated with an absencethat both is and annihilates vision.
If prayer then prayer to be free of the need for it.If renunciation then of the need to renounce.
To stand neither bored nor alarmedlooking out on my life
like a child’s chalk-drawing a child watcheswashed away by a storm.
A Dusk
How slowly the mountaintakes it in,like a diagnosisof darkness.
The consolationof a continuationthat has nothing to dowith you. [End Page 2]
Drive, 1982
There is no new thing under the sunbut the ever-reviving lives our losses foster,like the white-bloused girl wading cotton north of Dunnwho looked up the moment that I lost her.
Never Heaven
1
Remember? Our faces still flushedfrom the regions each in each had opened,we stepped outside to find the timehad turned to snow:
the soft approximate rooftops,the parked car like a grounded cloud,each particular treelimb, phonewire, fencepostmore visible for having vanished.
2
Do you rememberthe hours’ cashmere,
every pore aware,novitiates of never?
It left us uselessfor less. [End Page 3]
Flight
—after Anna Akhmatova
In the end we love the line love cannot cross.In the end we fall for what we fail.
Forget friendship. Ardor.Forget the years that only grow harder
as the soul recedes in what the years bring,grown alien to any touchable thing.
Touch me. As I am. As you can.My heart a bird’s heart just beyond your hand.
Envoi
The more I think the more I feelreality without reverence is not real.
The more I feel the more I thinkthat God himself has brought me to this brinkwherein to have more faith means having less,and love’s the sacred name for loneliness.
I speak a word I have not spokenand by that word am broken open,a cry entirely other entirely mine.
In league with the stones of the fieldI am by being healed. [End Page 4]
Christian Wiman’s ninth book, “Hammer is the Prayer: Selected Poems,” will appear from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the fall of 2016. He teaches at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and has been awarded this year’s prestigious Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry.
