To Inspecter 74

I found your yellow ticket in my pocket
the other day, and I thought should let
you know my jacket is holding up well.

It gets cold where I am and this tweed
keeps me as warm as the Scottish sheep
from whose wool the fabric was woven.

It has elbow patches now—in case you were
wondering—and my breast pocket always
wafts the lingering scent of pipe tobacco.

Sometimes I think of how your precise
eyes followed each of these seams, to
keep its wearer from catching a draft,

or how your hands might have run along
these folds, lapels, and sleeves to make
sure the weave ran smooth and straight.

I'm wearing a light blue shirt with it today:
is that okay? Do inspectors ever wonder
what shirts or men might fill these coats?

I imagine you are a man with round glasses and
a trimmed moustache who ends each of his days
judging jackets with some well-aged Bourbon.

But there are other times, when I imagine you're
a stunning woman, whose attentive eyes could
lovingly gather up all the loose threads of my life
and would weave them into something beautiful . . .

If the latter is the case, let's go on a long evening
stroll down by the water—and don't worry—
if it gets cold, I have a jacket you can borrow.

Dwarvish and Valaam Chant

Far over the misty mountains cold,

To dungeons deep and caverns old,

We must away, ere break of day,

To claim our long-forgotten gold.

The pines were roaring on the height

The winds were moaning in the night

The fire was red, it flaming spread

The trees like torches, blazed with light.

If you're having trouble getting this song out of your head after watching The Hobbit this weekend, or if you want something in the same style, I got it.  I was wondering, what it was, besides the depth of the dwarves' range, that resonated with me in this song.  Then I realized, dwarvish "chant" has the same thick and haunting bass drones (ison) as the Russian Orthodox chant from Valaam.

Both styles of chants have a single distinct melody, but rather than shadow the lead with some kind of harmonious parallel melody, the basses simply and deliberately shift up and down to change "the ground of the sound."  I don't know if Howard Shore or the other composers were inspired by Valaam, but it is interesting to note that monks, like dwarves, are bearded men, who enjoy singing and ale (Trappists), but who are more profoundly united by a common mission: their longing return to their true home, which was lost long ago.

The Beatitudes

Rejoice, Thou Bride Unwedded

A little more polyphonic

Dance and Kneel

this need to dance
this need to kneel:
                           this mystery:

                           Of Being, Denise Levertov

If you can kneel you can dance.
They use the same muscles:
beating hearts and ready legs.

Remember to Move

Gather your strength and listen; the whole heart of man is a single outcry. Lean against your breast to hear it; someone is struggling and shouting within you. It is your duty every moment, day and night, in joy or in sorrow, amid all daily necessities, to discern this Cry with vehemence or restraint, according to your nature, with laughter or with weeping, in action or in thought, striving to find out who is imperiled and cries out. And how we may all be mobilized together to free him. — Nikos Kazantzakis, 'The March', The Saviours of God


Think of those gentle quickenings
when the heart picks up its pace 
and you finally start
to walk with the rest of the world.

We move when meditation
becomes mediation and
walking with every thing.
All desires find their ends,
as feet and beat are one 
and we move to the one 
who made our rhythm 
and who thus makes us.

It only takes one before the other, 
but we lack the courage to stride.
When we don't respond,
our steps are stilled, but
the beat of our desire will not die.

These are the throbbing times
when the heart beats you and
drags you along by the ribs,
stomping grapes in your chest
to make the wine for which we long
and which is itself our longing.
All of which explains why we're
so impatient when the stomping starts.

The burning is the half-remembered cue 
that greatness lies beyond,
but we're too dim to think it could be
anything other than utter tragedy.

In these moments the rhythm's will is done and
it has its way with you, who never made way for it.
It hurts and is scary, as are all things to the timid.

So give it room to move you,
because when it is not with you,
you are not with yourself;
though the beat goes gladly on.

I wish I could say these words have freed me,
or that this journey had a cadence to it
which got me where I wanted to go.

But these were really all
one simple step forward,
which now awaits the other . . .


Of like kind: Moving On

Scribbles from 4am

The prayer you don't say
will keep you up
till the break of day.

As you toss in bed,
sleepless through the night,
it arises in your head
to get up and to write.

So scribble your restless heart
as it searches for its home:
they may remain far apart,
but at least you'll have a poem.

The Meaning of Art

"To give the intellectual meaning of the Divine work of art is possible only by creating art."  

From a homily by Romilo Knežević

The relationship between the mystical life and the creative life is so deep as to often be overlooked, because our minds gets in the way.  For some reason, we don't intuit that a creative action requires a creative response: art is hung in museums and not in studios, while orchestras play to audiences and not to musicians.  The arts have become spectator sports, where the layman is puzzled and the intellectual evaluates.  So often people think the correct response to art  is to ask the questions, "What's it really about? What does it really mean?" These questions are asked about art as much as they are about religious life, but they are intellectual questions, which can only receive intellectual answers; and so they are essentially different than artistic or mystical questions, which must receive artistic or mystical answers.

Art doesn't work on the level of an intelligible formal cause alone, but asks us to value the fact that there is matter at all.  Paint, wood, sound, and wool are not the material wrapper to the formal lollipop anymore than human hands are to human thoughts.  All of this matter, this stuff was created with intrinsic value of its own: "God saw everything that he made and behold, it was very good" (Gen 1:31). The soul's greatness lies in its ability to elevate and sanctify the matter given to it.  This is true in the bread and wine offered by the priest in Liturgy.  This is true in health when we exercise and eat well.  This is true is social ethics when we meet the needs of our neighbor so that we can both be more than we were given.

So in one sense art pertains to the material cause, but even more so to the efficient cause.  If God's creativity is the thing we are the most thankful for, the only proper response is more creativity: "Go and do likewise" (Luke 10:37).  If we have really perceived the beauty in art we must become creative agents ourselves.  If we really hear beautiful music, we may so resonated as to sing along.  However the synaesthetic quality of humanity means that we do not only have to answer music with music: as so often we answer music with dance, which is no less creative.  The best way to give thanks for being created is to create.

So what is it really all about?  The final cause of art grows out of God's creativity and person, which are identical.  The end of every human soul is to become a partaker in the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4) such that our humanity resonates in a divine manner (theosis). Art is an energetic microcosm in which we become more creative and more persons, because just as art transforms material into a means to unite the artist with his audience, so we are the material which must be transformed to unite divinity and humanity.

Meaning means the relationship between the two entities, or the medium by which the two entities communicate themselves to one another.  Man finds his identity in being simultaneously the receptive listener in this conversation and the language created to speak the God's own Word.  We are the means to his end and we are what he means to say: "The medium is the message" (McLuhan).

The paradoxical dual- (and even hypostatic) existence of humanity, as both means and end, is the heart of artistic inspiration.  When are truly creative, we understand we can only move our pen or voice to the degree that we are moved ourselves.  Our creativity cannot come from ourselves, because what we wish to express is ourselves: how can a mouth say a word which is bigger than it?

I need a mouth as wide as the sky

to say the nature of a True Person, language

as large as longing.

—Rumi

Our creativity must draw on a creativity which is more primordial than our near-sighted idiosyncracies.  Art is a means of communication between the artist and his audience, which necessarily means it is something bigger than the artist herself: so her work must ecstatically root itself in a creativity deeper than any dreams she has sketched or criticism she could anticipate.  Some religious people root their criticism of some men in God's deeper criticism of all men, but with regard to art neither our criticism nor our appreciation cannot fathom the depths of his creativity.  So let us sketch his sketches and sing his songs until they are truly ours.

Photo credits:
Iconographer: http://vimeo.com/48602918
Arvo Pärt and Tintinnabuli: http://www.last.fm/music/Arvo+Pärt
Woman with Turkish Carpet: http://davidcolemanphoto.photoshelter.com/image/I0000WsPk0.e.aF0

Anam Cara: Friends In Silence

This book has been with me for almost a decade now.
One of my most formative books, without me realizing it.

"One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to the hidden silences.  Often secrets are not revealed in words, they lie in the depth of what is unsayable between two people.  In modern life there is an immense rush to expression.  Sometimes the quality of what is expressed is superficial and immensely repetitive.  A greater tolerance of silence is desirable, that fecund silence, which is the source of our most resonant language.  The depth and substance of a friendship mirrors itself in the quality and shelter of the silence between two people."

When We're Away

When I think of what you hold
is it only wine and wheat?
Will this Mystery please unfold
and my hungry heart entreat?

Could all the days of your life,
when you walked this land,
put an end to all my strife
and set themselves in my hand?

All my friends and all your souls
safely swim in holy wine.
God who loves, God who consoles,
You gave me all I thought was mine.

Friends go away and rarely meet
scattered way too far:
crushed grapes and ground wheat
offered upon an altar.

I come to take this bread and wine,
I make my way to You,
You took all I thought was mine:
O Lord, take me too.

The Political Aisle

We're interested in what's right.
You can have whatever's left.

A Word On Time

My word embraces the silence as a drop holds the sea.

            A drop and the sea are thoroughly water: the only difference is time.  

One day a drop will fall and be held by the sea, 

which is nothing but the largest drop 

who receives its dancing brothers on its dimpled face.

            A word is born out of the same silence to which it will return.  

A word is silence through and through, though there is a difference of time.  

In time a word is a moving silence, 

dancing from mouth to ear, mind to mind, heart to heart. 

Then what is 

time? 

Eternity swallows every single moment 

while eternity is carried in every moment. 

            Rather than being a lost and lonely sister to the Past and the Future, 

the Present is their Mother who holds both so close to her breast.  

The Past bemoans her suffering and the Future confides her anxieties.  

The Past recounts her joys while the Future shares her hopes.  

In it all, the Present has selflessly receded to 

more lovingly listen to both her daughters. 

            She is that blink of an eye that embraces everything in sight.

Beauty and Balthasar

I read the following quote almost six years ago,
and then I knew I wasn't alone in my theological interest.

"Beauty is the word that shall be our first.  Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendour around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another.  Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to udnerstand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness.  No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man.  We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.  Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.  We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love."

From The Glory of the Lord. A Theological Aesthetics, Part I: Seeing the Form (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 18.

Tintinnabuli

This spider's evening

is spent weaving 'tween two bells

tolling dying day.

Moving On

"What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile."
Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins: A Novel

Romance in Romanticism

This is one of my favorite moments in German Romantic history.  Schelling was one of the most acute, passionate, and profound thinkers of Romanticism, whose insights challenged thinkers such as Fichte and Hegel.  His thought was incredibly influential to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who would really stoke the fires of British Romanticism.  Schelling's rigorous intellect, strong-willed character, and joyful stoicism was so remarkable, that upon first meeting him, Caroline Schlegel wrote to her brother-in-law, Friedrich . . .

Caroline Schlegel: Believe me, my friend, he is, as a man, more interesting than you concede: a real primal nature [rechte Urnatur]; in terms drawn from the world of minerals—granite.
Friedrich Schlegel: But where will he find female granite?

This is quite a statement coming from Caroline, who was married to another great German Romantic, August Wilhelm. She was a tenacious mind during this period, who between debating Novalis, Fichte, Hegel, Schiller, and even Schelling, was able to find the time to translate Shakespeare's works into German. This poignant moment of correspondence brings a smirk to historians' faces, because after divorcing Friedrich's brother, Caroline proved this moment prophetic moment by marrying Schelling, and showed that granite comes in many forms.

Why Gold Is Precious

Schüler: Das sieht schon besser aus! Man sieht doch, wo und wie.
Mephisto: Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
                 Und grün des Leben goldner Baum.
Schüler: Ich schwör' Euch zu, mir ist's als wie ein Traum.
                                                              (Goethes Faust)


When the sun bathes green trees with gold
no one wonders why this color enchants us.
A golden bracelet or ring reminds of evenings
when the sun's raiment clothes us like gods.


Gold is the color of the dying day,
that precious precipice where
the sun shakes her amber tresses
and we, her struck lovers, pause
as the whole enamored room turns
to all shades of rose and warmth.


We love gold because it testifies
to the setting we all long for,
the setting we're working for,
the vital concern of this 
living death or dying life.


We live for those Midas moments
whose alchemy and aura will
transfigure everything in sight
before we restfully settle
into our place in the horizon.

Book Spine Poetry: My Way of Life

There are new seeds of contemplation
growing in
the place within
my way of life:
the way of the pilgrim is
walking
with ambition and survival,
with confessions and cricket songs.
Searching for the the Discarded Image
of God who comes to mind.

We wander with Paradise lost
while God's many-splendored Image lies
like love in the ruins,
when love alone is credible.

The fact that earth abides
is a severe mercy
especially when miracles
sting through our broken music.

So let us rejoice in
poetry, language, thought,
till we have faces
and the courage to be.

Books
New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton
The Place Within: The Poetry of John Paul II, John Paul II
My Way of Life. A Pocket Edition of St. Thomas. The Summa Simplified for Everyone, Frs. Farrell and Healy
The Way of the Pilgrim, Anonymous Russian Peasant
Walking, Henry David Thoreau
Ambition and Survival: On Becoming a Poet, Christian Wiman
Confessions, St. Augustine
Cricket Songs. Japanese Haiku, Harry Behn
The Discarded Image. An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, C. S. Lewis
Of God Who Comes To Mind, Emmanuel Levinas
Paradise Lost, John Milton
God's Many-Splendored Image. A Theological Anthropology for Christian Formation, Sr. Verna E. F. Harrison
Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy
Love Alone is Credible, Hans Urs von Balthasar
Earth Abides, George R. Stewart
A Severe Mercy, Sheldon VanAuken
Miracles, C. S. Lewis
Broken Music, Sting
Let Us Rejoice: Poems 2003-2009, Seth Jani
Poetry, Language, Thought, Martin Heidegger
Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis
The Courage To Be, Paul Tillich

Rob Bell Doppelgänger

So today I saw this actor Jere Burns and he struck me as someone very familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on it . . .

The tone of voice, the facial structure, the delivery of his lines, etc.  Too bad he's playing a manipulative and villainous psychiatrist, when he could be a great Southwest Michigan pastor . . .

Conflicted By Fireworks

Like dandelions or chandeliers,

shards of stars are scattered across the sky. 

They crackle and splinter into weeping willows

or blast and cast light on the children's faces,

as they look up with joy and dreams,

holding the grass between their toes as

they watch these graceful explosions in the sky

on safe soil, bathed in radiant liberty.

Between the backs of lawn chairs,

one boy reclines and I can only see

his hand brightened by blasts

with two fingers, a barrel

and one thumb, cocked.

With each red, white and blue burst

his hand recoils from his pistol.

The heavens are his shooting ground.

The thunder echoes from his trigger.

His freedom shouts bang bang bang . . .

I close my eyes and the night is still glowing

as blasts break daylight upon

the arid mountains surrounding my village.

I hold my prayer cap as I run through the streets

as I see women running like shadows

as their black burkas flow between

the streets now turned to rubble.

I am half deaf and my head whirls

from bombs and the ringing of my ears.

I open my eyes to see

in the fading light of fireworks

ghastly skeletons of smoke

ushered off stage by the wind.

The boy put his hand down

fingers still smoking

because in his country

those sounds don't mean

the same thing.

These immaculately virgin skies

are pregnant with thunder

only on the joyous day

of this country's birth.

Explosions in heaven

are a Grand Finale

and here he applauds

and I wonder if I ever could.

Eros (Denise Levertov)

Denise Levertov (1923-1997) was a very attentive and articulate poet and woman, who always deserves a rereading.  Her simplicity of language and depth of meaning is always captivating to me.  Enjoy.

Eros

The flowerlike

animal perfume

in the god's curly

hair —

don't assume 

that like a flower

his attributes 

are there to tempt

you or

direct the moth's

hunger —

simply he is

the temple of himself,

hair and hide

a sacrifice of blood and flowers

on his altar

if any worshipper

kneel or not.

To My Future Children

I thought of you today
as the breeze rolled
through the window
and scattered my papers
all over the floor
like you later would.

I thought of how
guilt and surprise would
battle for your face,
when you caught my glance
and realized what you did
while lost in your play.

I laughed and picked up
today's windstrewn notes
knowing it would later be you
making messes for me, and
I looked forward to them today.

Before you ever had a name,
you brought a smile to me.
Before I knew you (or your mother)
your mischief was already welcomed.
Before you ever were,
you were already loved
as we all are.

The Morning We Walked

You ran ahead of me
today across the hill
and each of your strides
sent waves through the grass
bending the blades with your joy.

When I reached out to
hold your hand in mine,
my fingers closed and my hand
disappeared as yours still stands,
and the wind dances gladly on.

I breathed the morning's dew as
the growth and ground yielded
their lavish petrichor, which
filled me with a scent as
sweet as your laughter.

Pink petals of fallen blossoms
litter the streets and mingle
with trash in the gutters
covering the concrete like
the tender rest of snowfall.

Walking down the sidewalk
there are countless downcast
faces busy avoiding gaze:
searching for refuge, they
ignore those they pass by.

But I know it's your face
hiding behind their's which
is why I always offer kind eyes
to remind them and myself
that love has not yet died.

I know it's your heart I hear
echoing behind each of my beats
like footsteps following closely
down the hall we both walk,
toward the door we both will open.

You Goethe Be Kidding Me . . .

My charming German tomes silently sitting right before my desk.

It is impossible to accomplish anything but Romantic ecstasies into the Sublime or poetic intoxication, when my recently acquired volume of Goethe's Faust (Erster Teil, Zweiter Teil, Urfaust, und Goethe über Faust) is sitting with my own hand-scribbled Fraktur script slithering and staring back at me, beckoning me with a mocking din of tollit lege ringing in my ears as Augustine once heard.  But like all good addictions, a reading of Goethe will slake my thirst for a verse only to rake the coals desiring one more stanza.  I'm reminded of one of Goethe's essays on Shakespeare, wherein Wilhelm Meister recounted his first reading of Hamlet, "You would think that while reading them, you stood before the unclosed awful Books of Fate, while the whirlwind of most impassioned life was howling through the leaves, and tossing them fiercely to and fro."  Goethe can definitely be seen as aspiring to the heights described by Meister here and if Goethe is the Shakespeare of German, Faust is his Hamlet.  I'm trying to read and to write some exams, but catharsis is calling and the rhymes are chiming, the Devil dances and the drama dins, and to me Goethe as he tosses in a poodle just for good measure.  Its a pleasure to have my soul riddled with these verses, however unproductive that may make me. Perhaps you'll see what I mean.

Mephistopheles:                                                              
[Er gibt seinen Name]  Ein Teil von jener Kraft,            
Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft.          
Faust:
Was ist mit diesem Rätselwort gemeint?                      
Mephistopheles:                                                              
Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint,                                
Und daß mit rechts, denn alles was entsteht,                  
Ist wert, daß es zu Grunde geht;                                      
Drum besser wär's, daß nichts entstünde.                        
So ist denn alles, was ihr Sünde,                                    
Zerstörung, kurz das Böse nennt,                                    
Mein eigentliches Element.                                            
                                            Mephistopheles: [Offers his name]
                                            A part of that Power which would
                                            Ever Evil do; yet ever does the Good.
                                            Faust: 
                                           A riddle! Say what it implies!
                                           Mephistopheles:
                                            I am the Spirit that denies!
                                           And rightly too; for all that doth begin
                                           Should rightly to destruction run;
                                          'Twere better then that nothing were begun.
                                          Thus everything that you call Sin,
                                          Destruction- in a word, as Evil represent-
                                          That is my particular element.

Schüler:
Das sieht schon besser aus! Man sieht doch, wo und wie.
Mephistopheles:
Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und grün des Leben goldner Baum.
Schüler:
Ich schwör' Euch zu, mir ist's als wie ein Traum.
Dürft' ich Euch wohl ein andermal beschweren.
Von Eurer Weisheit auf den Grund zu hören?
Mephistopheles: Was ich vermag, soll gern geschehn.


                  Student:
                  Now that looks better! Now one sees 
                  the where and how!
                  Mephistopheles: Dear friend, all theory is grey,
                  And the golden tree of life is green.
                  Student: I vow,
                  It's all just like a dream to me.
                 Another time I'll bore you, if I may,
                 To hear your wisdom through and through.
                 Mephistopheles: All that I can, I'll gladly do.

Sailing the Sea of Rahner's Mystery

Karl Rahner, S. J. (1904-1984)

For all other understanding, however clear it might appear, is grounded in this transcendence.  All clear understanding is grounded in the darkness of God.

I'm doing a little writing on Karl Rahner's concept of human nature and grace and reread this perennially phenomenal passage from the Introduction to his Foundations of Christian Faith.  Enjoy . . .


What is made intelligible is grounded ultimately in the one thing that is self-evident, in mystery.  Mystery is something with which we are always familiar, something which we love, even when we are terrified by it or perhaps annoyed and angered, and want to be done with it.  For the person who has touched his own spiritual depths, what is more familiar, thematically or unthematically, and what is more self-evident than the silent question which goes beyond everything which has already been mastered and controlled, than the unanswered question accepted in humble love, which alone brings wisdom? In the ultimate depths of his being man knows nothing more surely than that his knowledge, that is, what is called knowledge in everyday parlance, is only a small island in a vast sea that has not been traveled.  It is a floating island in a vast sea that has not been traveled.  It is a floating island, and it might be more familiar to us than the sea, but ultimately it is borne by the sea and only beacause it is can we be borne by it.  Hence the existentiell question for the knower is this: Which does he love more, the small island of his so-called knowledge or the sea of infinite mystery? Is the little light which he illuminates this island—we call it science and scholarship—to be an eternal light which will shine forever for him? That would surely be hell.


If a person wants, of course, in the concrete decisions of his life he can always choose to accept this infinite question only as a thorn in the side of his knowledge and his mastery and control.  He can refuse to have anything to do with the absolute question except insofar as this question drives him to more and more individual questions and individual answers.  But only when one begins to ask about asking itself, and to think about thinking itself, only when one turns his attention to the scope of knowledge and not only to the objects of knowledge, to the transcendence and not only to what is understood categorically in time and space within this transcendence, only then is one just on the threshold of becoming a religious person.  From this perspective it is easier to understand that not many are, that maybe they are not capable of being, that they feel that it demands too much.  But anyone who has once raised the question about his transcendence and about its term can no longer let it go unanswered.  For even if he were to say that it is a question which cannot be answered, which should not be answered, and which, because it demands too much, should be left alone, even then he would have already given an answer to this question, whether the right one or the wrong one is here besides the point.

Caspar David Friedrich The Monk by the Sea, 1810

Warm on the Shore

It had been a long time since she last strolled along that shore in the evening’s failing light.  Her dark jeans hugged her strong legs and her white shirt clung to her youthful and tapering figure.  Around her, a man's gray-checkered flannel shirt ironically whipped in tandem with her graceful hair, as both were caught in the restless and salty wind.  The long dock had been stripped and only its pillars congregated in a mute cluster strewn in the surf.

  

She could almost hear them talking amongst themselves, between the sounds of gulls calling, waves rushing, and her own feet scuffing against the grains of sand.  In the gentle tumult of waves and wind, the buoy bell knelled its lonely ringing weaving across the waves.  Her mouth curled into a gentle smile and then they spoke up, with salty breath out of their black wooden mouths.

            “It’s a bit windy for stroll, isn’t it?”

            “All alone tonight?”

            “Isn’t that shirt a little big for you?”

            “I think you’re growing bigger and more beautiful every day.”

            “Oh come on, Grandpa,” she said as she held his hand years ago, “I’ll always be your little girl.”  She held her shoes in her right hand and his robust yet wrinkled hand in her left as both their bare feet shuffled along the shore.  They would often stop to pick up shells, listen to the music of the wind and buoy, or just to look past the gawking black pillars to the peaceful horizon made of restless waters.

            “It sure is windy tonight isn’t it, sweetie?”  The wind had tickled goosebumps all along her arms and she hugged his belly as best she could with shells and stones in her tiny fists.  He looked down on his granddaughter as the wind blew her locks of hair about and a gentle chill crept in.  He rubbed her arms a bit longer, but then took off his grey flannel and wrapped his princess in a humble robe.  She smiled up at his tired face and wise eyes as he stood in his white undershirt.

            “It looks good on you . . . How about you keep it?”

            “I’ll take good care of it, Grandpa.”

            “Good, sweetie, I’m sure it’ll keep you warm” he said.
                                                'Even when I can’t,' he thought.

            “It’s still warm, Grandpa,” she said with a smile still gracing her face and her arms still lost in its warm folds after all these years.

            “It still looks good on you,” piped up the pillar. The flannel flapped in the evening breeze.  The lonely buoy tolled.  In the rich silence, upon which the wind and waves rushed, the pillars stood black and mute. She hugged the folds more and more snuggly around her.  The flannel held her all these years, still soft, still warm, still saying, “You’re growing bigger and more beautiful every day.”

A Scholar's Altar

We scholars have altars of our own.

Our desks hold the relics of

pens, pencils, and loose change.

Upon this wood

the fruit of thoughtful minds

and work of studious hands

is offered like

the incense of academia;

pipe smoke rising in rings

to meet you out there,

in hopes that your grace

might come down like the dewfall

upon my meager scribbles and

transubstantiate them into an essay,

or a thesis, or in this case a poem,

whose totality and vitality

might nourish and burn

you who read it.

From this humble sacrifice of

spilled ink and shared thoughts,

Let communion grow

between the words on these pages

and those humming in the volumes 

on our bookcases and shelves.

Let communion grow between

all those murmuring words,

be they in books or in minds

         committed to ink or 

         still lingering in thought.

Let love grow between ideas 

and those who love them

and know that in this moment,

when these sounds were on a tongue,

when a poem was greeted by your ears

when your imagination tried

to give these thoughts shape

that indeed

some communion happened.