Polemics

Amid the shouts of euthanasia death
panels and water the tree of liberty
Eat my flesh and drink my blood
As if we need more outrageous harangue
To insult the intelligent and rile the ridiculous.
Can’t we all just get away from there
to find accord in covenant?
Blood-thirsty, perhaps, but not yet cannibals,
Come now, let us reason together,
Says the Lord
Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man,
and drink his blood,
you have no life; and
Will you also go away?

I could not move.
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth
My wounds stink and are corrupt for my foolishness
And I set my face toward the ground, and I became dumb.

I drank the turret's cool air
Spreading playfully his hair.
And his hand, so serene,
Cut my throat. Drained
Of senses, I dropped unaware.
How delicate in love you make me feel.

Maenads

Montanas too are gods
in their own rite
in other languages
to be worshiped
or ignored
It matters not to them.

Montanas remember in their rocks
the days and nights of seas, glaciers, searing winds.
Their skirts of scree testify
hard times and memories
too bitter for the fragile codes
encapsuled by our DNA.
And yet they gaze with fondness
on the living forms that gather
in their sheltered shades.
They preen in wraps of greenery,
in too-revealing gauze of pines,
and barely hide their leaking, wrinkled
crevasses beneath foundation clothes
of lichens, ferns and fungus.

Montanas dote on darling life
caressing that which clings and suckles
at their madonna breasts,
until the wild hot winds and lightning storms
call them out again to dance with fiery flumes
and feathered plumes of pillared smoke,
to celebrate communion with their deities,
the galaxies and stars.

The Leafless Black Bole Oak Trees

The Big Round Tree

I grew up at the end of a coal cinder road on the frontier of Louisville, dead at both ends with an outlet to Hartlage Court in the middle. It was called Stuecker Avenue after the farmer who had owned the land. At the far end of the cinders, beyond where the road fell into a drainage ditch and rose up again a dirt path, was Poppy Avenue. At our end was The Big Round Tree. The name Poppy Avenue enchanted me; it was the extreme end of my universe, vague and far away. The Tree was no less mysterious; but solid like a sacrament, and closer.
A narrow, twisting two-lane highway, Hartlage Court was dangerous. It coiled not far behind our house. Parents lived in terror of their children playing anywhere near it. We heard stories of the teenager who lost control of his car and sprayed his brains in a maple tree. They had no choice but to cut it down.
Stuecker Avenue, by contrast, was quiet. The only cars to get as far as our house belonged to relatives and Dad. One time Mom set me up on her bike and ran alongside as I worked the pedals. Before we got to the ditch she turned me around and pointed me back toward home.
In the late 1960’s an interstate juggernaut plowed through our neighborhood, taking farms and orchards, fields, creeks and homes in its mindless course. If there were schools, churches or stores in its way they went under too. It cut Hartlage Court like a snake into two dead-ended parts. Our cinder road, renamed Crumms Lane, morphed into a four-lane speedway. Kids like to honk their horns under the viaduct for the echo, a startling, nuisance noise which Mom finally learned not to hear.
But that's too many years passed my story. The challenge of writing spiritual geography is making a place stay in the narrow moment when you were there.
Old Man Stuecker used to swear at his plow horses in German on the other side of Stuecker Avenue. I don't actually remember that either. Mom said she was glad we didn't speak German.
Our first house was a second hand Quonset hut. Dad found it in the classifieds behind a filling station and purchased what looked like a pile of scrap lumber for a nominal sum. He set it up as a T rather than its original I-shape, but it still looked like a barrel buried half in the ground. Its green tar shingle roof stretched in long sheets over the arch to the cinder block foundations on either side, the house lacked proper walls, except at its three ends.

If our Quonset hut suggested frontier poverty, The Big Round Tree spoke of majesty. It stood about two hundred yards off our property and seemed to be owned by no one. It belonged to itself. Had anyone needed a landmark to find his way that oak tree was unmistakable: "Just hang a right at The Big Round Tree and that's Hartlage Court."
Because it stood alone with no other trees, several of its broad muscular limbs stretched horizontally, parallel to the dry, barren earth beneath it. Like a man who takes as much space as you give him because no one pushes back, this tree annexed land in every direction. Its crest, if not round like a ball, nevertheless arced into the arch of the sky. Its size and strength and dense, impenetrable foliage suggested the eternal life of endless seasons.
In the heat of the summer when I devoured library books – the Box Car Children, The Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, Tarzan and the Apes, and so forth – one a day -- I often sat reading in the shade of that tree. It was our living room, meeting spot and play room. If anyone were inclined to prayer it was as good a place as any.

I often studied the prospect of climbing The Big Round Tree, and assayed various schemes, but its lowest branches were far above my reach. One limb especially invited contemplation. It was not much higher than the ceiling in your living room, but thick, too much to grab with the claws of one’s hands. Even a grown man could not leap up and clamber onto it; much less, a boy.
One time, thinking we might attain the impossible at last, we threw a rope over that limb, tied the other end around my neighbor Bruce and hauled him up. He dangled there in the air, kicking his feet and trying to get a hold. For reasons only God could explain someone let go the rope, the rest of us lost our grip, and he fell. We didn't mean to break his arm. He jumped up and ran home bawling, and wore a plaster cast the rest of the summer.

Like many old things in our neighborhood, the tree was not given a dignified death. First they lopped branches off for power lines to run through it, then chopped off the whole side as they paved our cinders into macadam.
When I came home in late May from the seminary I found its branches and trunk lying on the ground. Its root ball hulked over a massive hole. In another year or two the Caterpillars would return to build a strip mall.
Today, in place of The Big Round Tree, a thick iron pipe, anchored in cement, hoists a large, wind-damaged fluorescent sign. The sign posts the presence and desperate needs of a liquor store.

Planet gazing

Enormous Jupiter, or so I’m told,
Observed from deep, deep space, orbits
Our neighbor sun in solitude, a sole
companion with – perhaps – some smaller bits
of space debris. Its core, a diamond sphere
of earth-sized crystal carbon sheathed in dense
and swirling liquid gas, approaches near
to thermonuclear might. It might ascend
to stardom………
.........………….So the Blessed Mary soars
in orbit round her son, and those who see
the woman and the God whom she adores
devoutly pray to join her company.
They glory in the radiance of her light,
astonished by the mercy of a widow’s mite.

His records describe...

His records describe another derelict, wasted by warfare and consummate passions, ripped by currents of public demand. I have what you want and you should only ask -- or take. It doesn’t matter which. They persist because neither he nor they can imagine differently. They wanted booze, they wanted cigarettes, they wanted sex or something like it and he gave his all, his body to war, his lungs to smoke, his liver to beer, his mind to lust and now he’s old and broken at fifty, with children who want nothing because he had nothing for them. He wanted so much to be somebody and now he is a wasted body in the VA hospital.
Despite the records he wasn’t crazy when I talked with him. He accepted my prayers just as he accepted everyone’s desire. Each wanted something and each took a piece. They’ll send him home soon to resume his smoking and beer and his little garden of tomatoes and blackberries, the little plot where he buried his soul in the kindly soil, expecting something of which he never dreamt.

Double Dactyls

Strawberry blackberry
Gary of Yarberry
Planned a big bash for the
Chaplain of Spain,

until he suddenly
Undemocratically
called off the party be-
Cause of the rain

Hummingly, chummingly
Juniper Cummingly
prayed in his chamber for
sweet things that were

not incidentally
characteristically
whispering muttering
wholly unheard.


Greenamen beanamen
Dismas of Veeneman
Conquered the world with out-
Breaking a sweat

Then in a moment of
Psychopathology
Ordered the province to
Pay off his debt.


Bannister canister
Janet McAllister
sang in a chorus her
pretty new song

All about Venus and
uranographical
planets appearing in
red on her thong.

Amazon gastronome
Jennifer Aniston
Wore a red bathing suit
All the day long,

But her dad said she was
Extraterrestrial
When she dove into a
Deep billabong

Seven Glorious Mysteries

Resurrection
A singularity of silence speaks
astonishing in strength, exuberant
and riant till the distant morning peaks
are smiling with a sudden joke; and buoyant
fiery clouds are cheery, cherry red.
They peel away the brooding mourning sky
to show the throne of majesty outspread,
nor do the waters of the rivers shy
to splash and spray their joy this festive day.
Beyond all hope, beyond our fantasies
beyond the fondest force that might display
some careless acts of generosity
the one who suffered death now lives again;
behold the empty tomb where he has been.


The Ascension
Behold the empty tomb where he has been,
and notice, if you will, the vacant sky;
you need not stand there looking up, for when
he comes again you’ll know it. By the by,
get moving now. Go up into the town
and breathe, just breathe. You understand
the dignity which wore a briar crown
now shepherds all the earth, and his command
is gentle. Do not be afraid. So good
is God. Retreat into the upper room,
your holy cenacle and wait. You should
prefer your ignorance, and not assume
you know what you must do. There’ll come a day
when -- unexpectedly -- you see your way.

Pentecost
When -- unexpectedly -- you see your way,
your heart has found its rhythm and your breath
can pause and linger with each moment of the day,
when life is neither long nor short, and death
no longer frightens or dismays, you find
an openness to whatever comes.
Still reeling at events, they could not pine
for yesterday, but gathered all the crumbs
of memories and miracles to save
them for they knew not what. The air
was still around them, silence reigned as waves
of longing ebbed and flowed; and then their prayer
became a Spirit filled with brilliant fire
enflaming all the earth with God’s desire.


The Assumption of Mary
Enflaming all the earth with God’s desire
his mother spent her life in Galilee
receiving those who wanted to retire
in quiet for awhile. They had to be
alone with her whose early willingness
to hear the word of God and keep it safe
had borne such fruit. In Mary came to rest
a spirit wild, whose searing often chafed
the human heart. She made him one of us,
and in her house the wildest spirits turned
to gentleness. The sacred woman’s just
reward would not await her son’s return;
for by the Lord’s command and saints’ advice
the angels raptured her to paradise.


The Coronation of Mary
The angels rapture her to paradise,
and fire with air and watered earth atone;
the universe that saw her pay the price
now stands in awe before her starry throne.
God’s sacrifice of Calvary required
a mortal human complement, someone
who was not God yet utterly inspired
to give herself and more, her first born son.
The shackled earth once deeply mired in sin
now echoes saints and angel harmony,
it sings of her whose role as heroine
gave comfort to divine nativity.
So her apotheosis now complete,
The winds shall separate the chaff from wheat.


Judgment Day
The winds shall separate the chaff from wheat
as trumpets sound the coming of the Day.
The meek and poor of earth will stand to greet
The victor with his crown of thorns. They’ll say
“We shared our gifts with him, the few we had,
our anxious faith, and soiled love, our tremb-
ing hope, the stored up wealth of sad
long years. We brought them all to Bethlehem –
and Calvary. Who could expect this grace
appearing to us now? The wealthy too
will hail his justice as his broken mace
adjudicates atoning peace. Renewed
in all her cycling seasons Earth shall kiss
in ecstasy the consort of her bliss.


Bliss
In ecstasy the consort of her bliss
delights to draw his love. Their plunging falls
abandoned into grace and deeper grace
as each surrenders all control. She calls
him to behold her blemished purity
and he bedazzles her with open wounds.
They gleam like jewels. An endless treasury
From insects small to galaxies festooned
with radiance astonishes the soul;
and then exhausted, she withdraws to find
her body’s natural rhythms healed and whole.
Her nights and days, her gifts of heart and mind
are all restored. And when for more she seeks
A singularity of silence speaks.

Seven Sorrowful Mysteries

THE AGONY IN THE GARDEN

A singularity of silence speaks
within the settled hush of graveside terror.
The earth, still thirsting Abel’s blood reeks
of chthonic crimes now closing round, and icy air
of evening grapples him in panic’s brace.
The man, the body’s man perspiring clings
to respiration, its strength and grace,
its confidence and hope that brings
tomorrow’s dawn. Tonight he gives his breath
to prayer in spastic confidence and bides
remaining hours. Before the certain death
arrives, the passion feeds and faith provides
assurance. Courage succors fainting flesh
as magistrates prepare their flailing thresh.

THE TRIALS OF JESUS

As magistrates prepare their flailing thresh
they must observe the niceties of law.
The man entangled deep in common mesh
of family, neighbors, friends must now withdraw
beyond all human ken. He should despise
and be despised, then hanged beyond the reach
of mortal sympathy, nor should the eyes
of God discover in his plight a breach
between his guilt and shame. His impotence,
bewilderment, and pain will disconnect
all ties to earth. His sentence represents
our innocence, his agony perfects
the letter and the spirit of our rule.
A cross will make a pendant for this jewel.

THE SCOURGING OF JESUS

“A cross will make a pendant for this jewel.”
Although the treatment of the man is rough --
their binding, shoving, slaps and kicks are cruel --
his mute devotion silently rebuffs
each insult as it lands. But iron chains
flay his flesh, exposing vital parts
to fecal waste and fetid city lanes.
Their holocaust of violence resorts
to pranks, and every jape becomes a prayer
as majesty endures insult and rape --
humiliation finally must prepare
a man for death. His naked soul agape
before their vile abuse, bereft of God,
they lay upon his arm an iron rod.

JESUS IS CROWNED WITH THORNS

They lay upon his arm an iron rod
then fashion from a nearby tree a crown
of thorns. They roar approval at his nod
and bow their heads to hail their Jewish clown.
The soldiers place him like a king on Zion’s hill
with criminals for courtiers either side
and shouts of mocking ribaldry until
their eyes are streaming tears as if they cried.
A kind of bestial instinct worships him,
an irony beyond insane caprice,
that recognize in helplessness the grim
authority of beauty. At last their mocking ceased.
They stand him on his feet and lead him out
that he with cross and blood might blaze the route.


JESUS CARRIES HIS CROSS

That he with cross and blood might blaze a route
the son of Isaac goes to Calvary.
He can't afford the luxury of doubt
nor draw his eyes away from certainty.
He does not cringe before the crowded lanes
nor search for mercy where no mercy lies.
Abandoned by his own, his gaze remains
beyond that fatal place where goodness dies.
The sky that spoke so kindly gives no sign
of comfort, earth is silent, stolid, mute
as inbred madness growing still assigns
to him all wretchedness without refute.
Like Abram’s son ascending Mount Mariah,
he bears the wooden burden of pariah.


JESUS MEETS HIS SORROWING MOTHER

He bears with wood the burden of pariah,
a fearful gift received so long ago,
before his birth, a fated Jeremiah
called to expiate a history of woe.
So vindication scalds and frenzied temp-
est sweeps the same Jerusalem as mobs
exact again their angry punishment.
The frightened Maccabean widow sobs
and yet she won’t relent. Her son is not
the first to die for keeping faith nor will
he be the last. Her God has sought
her only child, a Christ of iron will,
a gift atoning sin and all its weight,
a gift within a holocaust of hate.

JESUS DIES ON THE CROSS

A gift within a holocaust of hate,
without connection to the earth but shoved
aloft until the city’s wrath abates;
of heavens too despised, a gift unloved,
alone, an offering of self, he will
remain in agony and silent calm.
His body's twisted dance goes on until
his every breath expels a tortured psalm,
an anguished prayer incarnate of his bowels.
And yet his life is not a broken pledge,
for by his shattered gift all sacred vows
are made complete; and through a sacrilege
of piety, insanity of Greeks,
A singularity of silence speaks.

Seven Luminous Mysteries

Seven Luminous Mysteries

A singularity of silence speaks
above complexity, a voice abrupt
startles locust eating crowds in muddy creeks.
It hails a man’s emergent birth, erupt-
ing suddenly from sin-drenched Jordan’s reek.
Who born was blameless now must be corrupt
with every guilt for he has come to seek
the damned. By guilelessness he will disrupt
deceiving systems; cleanse with his own blood
the face of earth, and lead by sweet allure
the lost to heaven’s bliss. Now from the flood
this baptized man is born, his mission sure:
that he should render from the worthless mud
the useful water, lowly, prized and pure.


The useful water, lowly, prized and pure
awaits a moment no one might suppose.
Neglected like a quivered bolt obscure,
it cleanses faces, hands, utensils, bowls
to keep the arcane rites. It must demur
address of treacherous or sinful woes
that desecrate, that blood alone can cure.
At last an unknown wedding guest bestows
upon the jars a word, a secret sign.
His mother sees but whispers nothing more
than “Listen closely, follow his design.”
“Draw some out. There’s plenty more in store,”
he says, “and all shall drink the finest wine.
Today’s the day for unsurpassed accord.”


Today’s the day for unsurpassed accord;
repent, believe the news, it starts today.
Disturbing people, occupied and bored
the shouting healer raced from burg to bay
he sang the news that thrilled the stricken horde.
They came because he brought a sudden ray
of hope where righteousness could not afford
assurance even for the dead. They laid
the sick and crippled, feeble, deaf and blind
beneath his voice, before his eyes, within
his reach; he cured them all. He’d come to find
the ones his father loved, and to begin
a new regime of mercy, to unbind
the shackled earth, so deeply mired in sin.


The shackled earth, so deeply mired in sin,
lay comatose and helpless before his sad-
dened eyes. Where does salvation start when
so little time remains? His early glad
beginnings paled before the demon’s win-
ning hand. The healed will die, the muddled mad
will slip into insanity again.
Were all his works, his signs and wonders, dead?
Then Silence whispered to his only son;
and gentle Moses spoke of God’s command;
Elijah stood beside him like the sun;
and beauty inundated all the land.
Redemption, mercy, healing would be won
with bayoneted heart and tortured hands.


…with bayoneted heart and tortured hands?
His body trembles as his spirit soars.
Whatever happens, fondness for his friends
will shape his prayer within his Father’s court.
And that surpasses bounds as every man’s
concern impales his heart, a stabbing sword
of brotherly affection. When Martha sends
him news – the death of Lazarus -- the word
invites his final test. He must go down
to save a life by giving one. The hour
has come. His sullen enemies abound
in Bethany, already they have scoured
the neighborhood to run him to the ground
as silence beckons him to Zion's tower.


As silence beckons him to Zion’s tower
the masses find relief in something true;
they open wide the narrow gate to shower
hosannas down upon his head, and “You
are seated on Israel’s praise, your bower
is silver and the finest gold.” But few
can dare imagine that a final hour
of fearful blessing looms, for something new
will smash even mantic madman rants;
the wicked with the righteous will collude
inspiring deadly blooms where desert plants
have failed. They cease their prehistoric feud
with precious harmonies and soulful cants.
For peace must pitch his tent with Adam’s brood.


For Peace must pitch his tent with Adam’s brood
apparently to settle old accounts;
and some believe his pleasure will include
a pound of flesh for every precious ounce
of blood was spilt. God’s foolishness eludes
more clever schemes, they always pounce
on tenderness. Their vanities preclude
enormity that steps beyond all bounds.
So when he shares a meal of honest bread
and common wine, a homely rite of meek
simplicity, and comrades plunge ahead,
consuming unawares the flesh that seeks
atonement for the living and the dead,
A singularity of silence speaks.

Seven Joyful Mysteries

THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

A singularity of silence speaks
in emptiness of time, creates a void
of wholesome longing, a need which ever seeks
to know its source. It molds a gynaecoid 
receptacle worthy of itself,
so deep as to unbearable, so kind
as to commodious, a deepless well
in which infinity of good can find
untainted welcome formed by human need.
Before her breathing or the beating of her heart,
before the history of sin can plant its seed
a silent movement flowing through unchart-
ed depths selects this girl to know and sing
of all the prayers of every living thing.

THE ANNUNCIATION
Of all the prayers of every living thing
from Adam’s sob to Zechariah’s song
the sighing of the breaking morning’s breeze
and midnight’s weeping of a murdered wrong,
alone upon the earth her prayer was heard.
For every other plea pled for itself
and begged of God a sympathetic word
a ransom, healing or sufficient wealth.
But she alone prayed thy kingdom come
and let my people go her daily prayer.
Her constant watch and heartbeat’s steady drum, 
an irresistibly seductive peer-
ing to the reaches of infinity:
enticed thy grace to her fecundity.

THE VISITATION
Enticed, thy grace to her fecundity
discovered unexpected mother lodes
of courage in this woman-child. With glee
she braved the roads and disapproving scolds,
exploring fearlessly the angel’s bond.
She meant to witness in her cousin’s room
the wind-blown benefit so far beyond 
ancestral hopes, now seen in barren womb.
As ancient Betty hailed the queen of light
beneath the searching eyes of Roman rod 
and Mary sang the failure of the night,
the solstice child saluted solstice God.
No power of earth supposed what these four knew,
the Providence that loves the least is true. 

JESUS IS  BORN IN BETHLEHEM
The Providence that loves the least is true
especially to dwellers by the edge
where goods are scarce and services are few.
They wait upon the heads of state who pledge
to honor every sacrifice the poor
can make to keep the powerful in might;
but in their hearts they know they must endure
the claims of arrogance until the night
sky splits apart and angels sing of joy
beyond imagining. When heaven’s splend-
or floods the darkened plain and baby boy
lies swaddled in a cote they will attend
the one whose holy name, Messiah-Lord,
will calm discord and shatter every sword.

THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE

Will calm discord and shatter every sword
when forty days have passed, and Mary brings
her first-born to the temple? Will doddering hoard
of creeds dissolve and welcome infant things
to purify a world of stony hearts? 
An ancient seer snatched the infant from
the maid amazed and wept, “My life departs,
O Holy God, and now I must succumb
before the one whose coming was foretold.”
The widowed prophet Anna came upon
the company and saw her life unfold.
They sang to Zion’s anawim this song,
As Eli welcomed Hannah’s Samuél,
We bless thee God and greet Emmanuél. 

THE WORSHIP OF THE MAGI
We bless thee God and greet Emmanuél
Mysterious strangers whisper to the child.
The evening gloom hears joyous sobs wel-
ling up, but now they speak of rumors wild
that sweep Jerusalem, and hearings with
the priests and Levites and King Herod's court,
how churlish mobs recall the ancient myth 
of God's Messiah. Heeding their report,
and troubled by the fatal scent of myrrh
portending death to Rachel’s little ones,
Joseph startles up the night with her
his fainting wife and nursing babe; he runs
for Africa. But angels overhead
his every step protect where he is led. 

MARY AND JOSEPH DISCOVER JESUS IN THE TEMPLE
His every step protect where he is led,
but even angels marvel at his ways.
The joy of social gathering, he’ll shed
companionship to walk off in a daze
of absent-minded thoughtfulness; and yet
attentive, often wrapped in wonder at
the flight of bugs, the squirm of worms, the fret
of neighbors for their kin. In awe he sat
with elders, asking of God’s word, as he
the Word Made Flesh, opened visions for
their eyes. This twelve-years boy can see
the deep dimensions of the law and soar
beyond the fated year of seventy weeks --
A singularity of silence speaks.