The formless pitch
When the stars go out at last,
God will fold up the tent,
His performance over for a while.
We can all have a good rest.
The catch is that each star
must burn itself out deliberately,
voluntarily, against all good judgment,
accepting its own inherent emptiness
rather than the roaring flame
of its separate existence.
It will happen – it is foretold;
as one by one the innumerable,
temporal stars give way to the original face of God
made visible again in the formless pitch.
O child of God, you speak of stars while failing
to
grasp the immediate at your fingertips.
Flatfoot
Feed me something that sticks
to my ribs; fills my belly.
Pour me a cup that’ll buckle my knees.
Let me hear shouts of Jesus
among the wooden pews.
I want to flatfoot to a fiddle tune,
boots scraping a raw plank floor.
Daintiness is for tatting doilies.
Utter me verses blunt and thick,
rough as a cob.
My house is the one
where my grandfather entered the world,
made of chopped-down timber, daubed mud,
a stone and mortar hearth. It’s where I first
look for rudimentary comfort and warmth,
to find the treasure I was promised
lies buried somewhere beneath.
O child of God, there are as many paths to God
as there are souls in the universe.
Peeking over the edge
I light a tea candle in my room
before a photograph of the Tomb
adorned with dried Samadhi roses
and assorted other gleaned icons
relevant almost exclusively to me
in a round red shallow, bowl-shaped
votive vase, the flame at once
strong, high, bright;
shadows thrown about the room.
I lower my eyes and gently invite
truth, surrender, Oneness, God
into my makeshift prayer chamber.
Much later, I raise my eyes again,
prepare to rise upon my muscles.
The flame is low, meek by then,
barely peeking over the edge,
floating humbly, improbably
in the spent fuel of limpid wax.
My room is dark again; vast,
intimate, evidentially divine.
O child of God, to experience the Everything
allow yourself to be reduced to nothing.
Deathbed
Sort of poetry by then, her juxtapositions
sans sequences, contexts, continuums,
sans tenses, pertinence, conventional wisdom;
a dark, intuitive truth, poetically incoherent
beauty
plumbing a deeper level if (loved) one
only knew how to listen,
but one never does;
wrapped up in who she thought she was
and should have been,
tried earnestly to be or not to be;
exhausting after a while the listener,
telling her last minute truth
from the bed of a murmuring brook
and really what is there left to say or hear
after a lifetime of chatter and love,
dutiful endeavor, compulsive volatility?
That was her poetry, too, largely incoherent
to everyone around even herself
and yet, as I have suggested,
strangely brave, beautiful and worthy.
O child of God, how better to greet the mystery
than with humble bewilderment and incoherence?
