Sabbaths 2009

For Giannozzo Pucci

"Why seek ye the living among the dead?"

Early in the year by my friend's giftI saw at Sansepolcro Piero's vision:The soldiers who guard the dead from the livingthemselves become as dead men, onetumbling dazedly backward. Awake, his woundsbleeding still, his foot upon the tomb, Christwho bore our life to its most wretched end,having thrust off like a blanket the heavy lid,stands. But for his face and countenanceI have found no words: powerful beyond lifeand death, seeing beyond sight or light,beyond all triumph serene. All this Piero saw.And we who were sleeping, seeking the deadamong the dead, dare to be awake. We who seesee we are forever seen, by sight have beenforever changed. The morning at lasthas come. The trees, once bare, are green.

II

We've come again to a garden begun,to warmth after cold, and the spring sunafter long nights. And now, today,we remember your birth and the wayyou've come from then until now,most of the way with me. Our old vowhas kept us returning again and againto this garden that once more we begin,that in our ways we both were born to,work of love the passing sun cannot undo.

III

After wind storm and ice stormthe woods floor is a mazeof trunks and branches, heavybodies brought violently down,which is the fate they stood for.In April now, after the coldand the blows, rising in the tangleso mightily shaken, broken, and fallen,in their turn come the small flowers,bluebell and rue anemone,larkspur and violet. In these,standing also in time to fall,shines the world's great tenderness,light and sight passingly touchinglike a kiss. Made no doubt by force,the world is saved by tenderness.After they fall, the fallen decayquietly by countless gentle acts.

IV

How little I know in my widestwaking, held here by the makingof days, days of work, days,fewer, of rest, suffering myselfto be made by days that cannotbe helped or changed or stopped,and so I wait to be changedby work, by rest, by whatI know into what I know not.

V

Tiny elegant birds, a pair, have comeagain to nest in the chinquapin oak.They are blue-gray gnatcatchers, or sowe call them. What they call themselveswe don't, will never, know nor what they have in mind. To some"objective" human minds, they aresmall machines at the beck and callof instinct, genetical—an insultto them, and to us all. Like humanscreatures even so slight can liveonly by thought. Like the syntaxof human speech, their nest survivesas a formal archetype, generationafter generation. They are born into it.But to gather it into substantial being,to build it actually in the placeafforded by the tree and chosenby them—a place, a choice like no others—they must think, as to speakin the order of speech we were born intothe right sentence in the right placeat the right time—a place, a timelike no others—we too must think.Let us praise, then, the least birdswho survive, after their kind, by thinking.

VI

Our vow is the plumb line,the signature and signsaying we are two, twoplighted to one life, a linedividing us to let us speak,to let us keep while we liveour promises to each otherin our need, openly to allwho may look, but vanishingas only we two knowwhen we indeed are one.

VII

For the apparent disorderof the broken woods—brokenby climate change? anyhowby climate—there is a plentitudeof reasons or causes, thoughwe do not know them allor the pattern of them, and sois disorder ordered, and sowe trust and live and lovethis place whose belongings we are.The woodland has no creed...