April 17 Poem

Yellow winter salt

box, what is your favorite

metaphor for snow?

The salt box comes in

September.  Some stay all year.

Salt for the summer.

Greenmount Ave salt box

Still here in April like an

Unseasonal bloom

Salt boxes for streets,

for corners, for not losing

ourselves in the ice

The salt box sings cold

notes in a winter with no

snow, sings just in case

Haiku for April 17, seventeen syllables for seventeen days or economies of language for tax day.  Sparseness, plenty.   I've been gone a little while in this April thing, but I'm not worrying about it.  Pick up where we left off.

April 5 Poem

The first time I went to a baseball game

was on a date with a lawyer who took

great pleasure in explaining it all.  All the

byzantine codes and stats, the delicious
order.  The best was the LOB number—Left on Base—
a figure so full of longing, so brimming,
the public mathematics of mourning
on the high-tech, high-stakes board, an algorithm
for wistfulness, keeping a count of what
didn’t happen, what nearly could have been. 
He told me Hemingway loved this game, and

Salinger, all those boys.  The hardness of flesh

with the wideness of metaphor.  No time clock—

In theory, it’s infinite.
                                     But writing this,
I realize, my real first game was years before
in New York, before I began looking at
time backward.  The afternoon was likely

gorgeous.  I don’t remember.  I don’t know

who won or lost, or whether we were good
students of metaphor that day.  Whether

we measured, began to decode the sadness

then and there, the enormous green field

of bodies and meanings.  We were breaking,

and I wonder if we stayed til the final pitch. 

It was fall in New York, and probably cold.

(Another weird little one.  The prompt was Opening Day, or sports, or firsts, and cripes, I wrote a baseball poem!  Who would have thought?  I'll do more to this later.  Now, time to go teach the freshmen....)

April 2 poem

Why is plenitude the hardest story?

Manna, so much, torrents of birds, of bread.

We turn the vastness, fullness into something other, hoary,

Why is plenitude the hardest story?

When we carry with us all this starry

Fullness, still believe we walk around with lead.

Why is plenitude the hardest story?

Manna, so much, torrents of birds, of bread.

Weird little poem today for Day 2.  The Napowrimo site assigned a triolet for yesterday, I'm getting to it today.  The Rev talked about trickster figures yesterday, about the images of plenitude in the Gilgamesh epic.  As usual, reverently/irreverently referencing (reverencing) the heavy-handed mosaic, the heavy-hearted mosaic behind our ambivalent UU altar.  Rabbi Jesus and his posse, he says.  Rabbi Jesus and these clowns.  To think he walked around with all the fullness, the total reveal and they never got it.  And we read them like they have something to say and they never got it.  

How little we expect to find birds in the desert.  How little we expect to find bread in the desert.  How much we expect the desert.  How little we expect light.

(A little more triolet research and finding that the form, originating in France, was used early as devotional verse (by Patrick Carey, a seventeenth-century Benedictine monk, says poets.org).  That meditative moving, pacing, turning over the same ground again and again, St. Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises, moving over that same ground.)  

The April 1 poem

As a child, I had a recurrent dream of very slow gears.  Enormous gears hanging as if in emptiness, not the sky, not a room, just emptiness, and turning very slowly, painfully slowly, and this was a nightmare, a scene painful to witness in its slowness, its enormity, but familiar, one I returned to, returned to.

The terror of sitting in the expanse where God is not an other.  (So strange to find God here not an other.) 

They say, write away from the object, the thing you have to say.

Use your words, they say.  A criterion for mystical experience is you can’t put it into words.  Use your words.  The divine child is ranting again and all you can do is teach it baby sign language.  Teach it a language it can touch with its own two hands.  That the divine is a child means it’s what you find buried in the core, in the blue pocket where you sit wrapped around the pea shoot of your own nativity, the namelessness locked in brine where you wait for the rest of your life. What would you sing if you had no name? 

When you learn to say lover, you learn to say something.  When you learn to sit in that blue pocket, you learn the word for breathing.  When you learn to breathe the whole body like a bagpipe, an enormous seahorse, a temple, when you learn to breathe the light through the third eye, such a strong sense of burnishing, the whole third eye, opening with ease, nothing but to wipe off the years of sludge and oldness, dead skin, oil slick.  Learning how to play this instrument, learning how.

The terror of sitting in the great expanse of all time, of all things, the expanse where God is not an other.  Where the great gears turn and we sit in the giant clock, nameless.  Hung out there, with no systems to make the universe smaller.  To make love smaller.  The terror of this expanse, the chest so open it scares of breaking, the body learning these new shapes, one by one, how to click into the next notch, the next notch a little more open, a little more nameless.

So strange to find God here in the last place you’d think to look, under your own skin.  Like losing a favorite toy.  Like coming back to words, the first dream from childhood, first word.

Jennifer wrote me this morning about Thanksgiving poems and Gerald Manley Hopkins, old, old love.  It's the time of year--moving into High Holy Days and the leaves falling out of the trees, earth falling out of the sky. 

 ("That kitten's not sleeping; it's in religious ecstasy after reading Hopkins!" --Molly S. on my bookish foster kittens.)

I just finished an impractical month of driving to Bethesda for a four-week class on Contemporary American Poetry of Spirituality at the Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church.  A DC poet, Kim Roberts, was offering it, and I thought, why not: it's just 4 weeks, and nobody ever talks about the spiritual side of poetry, which is why I got into this stuff in the first place.  It was an hour drive, but I finish teaching at 1:30 pm on Tuesdays and don't begin teaching again til 1:30 pm on Wednesdays, and what is the academic schedule for, if not to accommodate exactly this sort of blessed impracticality?

Bethesda is a suburb of DC, but Biblically, it is the healing pool in Jerusalem where the lepers waited and watched for a troubling of the waters.  An angel to move upon the water?  You know the spiritual,
"Wade in the water.... God's gonna trouble the waters. " Beth hesda, house of mercy, house of grace.  

(And to thicken the plot, the internet is giving me this gem this morning: "In the closely related Syriac branch of this ancient language, the cognate term hesdo has two opposite meanings - grace and disgrace; this dual meaning may have been thought appropriate since the location was seen as a place of disgrace due to the presence of invalids, and a place of grace, due to the granting of healing.")  

Grace and disgrace, the pool known for healing also known for disease.  The bad and better angels of our natures, always holding hands.

Our class was at one end of Cedar Lane in a low, squatting wood and  stone UU church nearly buried in woods and barely visible from the road (I drove straight past a number of times before finding it) and at the other end of Cedar Lane, the spires of that massive Mormon Temple you see driving 495 W from Maryland, reaching up into the sky like Oz.  Strange transcept.

We didn't read Hopkins in that class (not American, not contemporary) but read so many people who are thinking about faith and gave ourselves four Tuesday evenings to talk about words and sounds and spirit and doubt in a room of laughing Unitarians who hold nothing and everything sacred.  What I love about UUs is that the room is full of religious scars; everyone seems to quietly laugh/mourn/taunt their childhood faith, faiths lost and found, so many mixed feelings.  The evenings went later and later, until I was driving home at 9, then 10, then 10:30.  Back to Baltimore by 11:30.  Back to work and school and poetry.

I've been getting more involved in my own Unitarian church here in Baltimore this year, going recently to the minister's class on Wednesday evenings, and he (a glowing, pot-bellied, sometime atheist prone to mystic experiences, and queer as a $3 bill) says that the UU association has been noting a new need for religion.  Get religion, he says.  Funny, people come to church for different reasons in different ages, social standing, moral guidance, community acceptance (it's the thing to do), appearances, moral instruction for their children, but today, he says, people are coming to church because they're seeking spiritual sustenance.  Religious experience.   Really just that.  And coming to UU church, which has historically been so rational.  So, the church is thinking about ways to be itself and also inject some old time religion up in those secular humanist rafters. 

I think about it in yoga, too, at the top of downward dog, all these asses in the air here for something we're not getting on the street, and it's not just good abs.  All these sidewalk yogis here with our stretch pants and stretch marks looks for something truly blessed in strip mall yoga studios all across America.  Lately, I've been thinking the yoga craze isn't an exercise craze at all; it's a spiritual craze.  It's middle America chanting in sanskrit, breathing in to recover one sense of meaning, asana by asana.  Bodily epistemologies.  Flesh and spirit.

Anyway, this isn't really about Hopkins, queer mystic, but I taught him in the sonnet class this semester, so he's been in the middle of all this for me, as he always is.  But it is, again, about the place where spirituality and poetry and the body come together again, and come into language.  Time to stop and put some of it down.