This empty cup

This empty cup                                                                                 

 

Enough for me, this empty cup.

With your own lips

 

You have drained it of the world’s wine

and left a promise – the distant scent

 

and stain of Your own vintage.

Each day I enfold its rough clay

 

and murmur a prayer,

lift to my lips its soured nothingness,

 

taste the exasperatingly faint

intimation of Your nothingness.

 

And setting it down, abandon again

the world’s shimmering images,

 

imaginings and intoxications,

its brief, bitter sweetness.

 

For me, enough (is enough) this empty cup,

until its clay mouth is crushed again,

 

its hollowness filled with debris,

buried in the earth’s whirling wheel  

 

for yet another stab at Your ethereal lightness,

assured Oneness, Your sobering, holy wine.

 

O child of God, the world is mad with drink.

Rejoice in your disaffected indifference.

Call His name

Call His name                                                                              
 
The darning of a sweater,
a pulling on the oars;
 
the sawing of a casket plank,
a bell’s tolling;
 
a calling bird in the green wood;
its flap of wings across the sky;
 
the knocking on a door,
the chimes of a clock,
 
singsong, singsong, say His name –
Meher Meher Meher Meher . . .
 
sewing us up; sewing ourselves
to His silence, with each stitch
 
more inseverable, each stroke, toll,
call and flap; each knock
 
upon heaven’s solid, heavy door,
calling to the One inside.
 
O child of God, call His name
until it sings in your veins. 

The One Who never leaves

The One Who never leaves                                                          
 
O pilgrim!  We come into this world,
grow up, grow old and depart, or so it seems.
 
This existence into which we are tossed
stays and we move on, or so it seems.
 
But a few have come over the ages to say:
I am the One Who never leaves! 
 
They come to say: I alone exist
and you and I are not we but One.
 
O pilgrim, we are the One Who never leaves!
Pilgrim being a misnomer,
 
we are the One Who never goes anywhere –
the still river the bridge flows through.
 
Ceaselessly around Us, illusion arises,
flourishes, then is destroyed –
 
again and again – ephemeral, temporal,
illusory, flowing ceaselessly
 
around the One eternal existence
which is Who we are – the One Who never leaves.
 
O child of God, maya is the apparently erroneous
notion that you are born, you live and you die.

Our guaranteed return

Our guaranteed return                                                                     
 
The world’s a nothingness and God’s a myth,
wrote the poet Francis.  You have shown me this.
 
You have shown me this . . .
setting Francis to roam the nothingness,
 
singing ‘neath that boundless starry dome,
singing words awaiting, awaiting
 
the flood of the Word of words.
Francis lost, a mote in a dust whorl,
 
left behind by the Reality to Which the myth alludes.
A billion years (by his estimation) to get his heart in tune,
 
ready to sing the Real song.  O Francis,
I am with you.  I am with you on the dusty plain,
 
‘neath the spangled bell jar dome, singing,
singing and waiting for the Lord to take us home.
 
O child of God, let the longing pierce your songs
with the sweetness of our guaranteed return.

The journey that never was

The journey that never was                                                             
 
A kind of exile you are now
unable to walk the same aisles,
 
sit in the same pew as others,
hands folded quietly in your lap.
 
Your eccentricity showing through
the bursting seams of your threadbare coat.
 
You’ve dropped the things you’re supposed to
care about; your interests few.  Old friends
 
(who never really were) have drifted away
while you to some measure have left behind
 
your loved ones, for their sake,
to go searching for the eternal connection. 
 
You follow the flow of an uncharted river
as you push toward oblivion
 
and wonder when this latest rug
will be pulled out from under your feet. 
 
It doesn’t really matter anymore.
It’s all a part of the journey that never was.
 
O child of God, should it be surprising
that the new life is nothing like the old?

(drawing by Rich Panico)

Paper tiger

Paper tiger                                                                                         
 
At some point, the path becomes self-verifying,
its own guide; with easily discernible boundaries.
 
At some turn in the road, annihilation
portends freedom, the right thing to do;
 
the only treasure to give.  Every self-assertion
becomes transparent and repugnant;
 
every question identified as the dodge,
deflection that it is; every guile pathetic,
 
the crumbling castle, feet of clay;
the paper tiger insufficient in its roar. 
 
At some point, the arrows fail to penetrate
and the clamor of the crowd, the invalidation
 
of the enchanted, the drunken and oblivious
become palm leaves under donkey hooves,
 
aiding the pilgrim to wend his the way. 
At some arrival, you swing through a door
 
and though you weave in and out for a time thereafter,
losing your grip and footing, there’s no turning back,
 
no way to remain that which you no longer
seem to be and have lifelong been.
 
O child of God, the path never gets easier
but dedication brings surety and daring.  

Out of earshot

Out of earshot                                                                                     
 
You’ve had enough of words, said my Lord,
but in truth, I have been long content
 
measuring my appraised worth against
distant utterings and their echoes –
 
sound waves crashing upon an empty shore;
quotations taken always from someone else’s book.
 
I have sought lifelong the living among the dead,
surrounding myself like a consensus
 
with cardboard and paper gravestones
as I pray so touchingly, beseech so effetely
 
for a truth that was never there for me
or has long since fled.
 
So very long it has taken me to hear it –
truth doesn’t enter through the ear.
 
O child of God, seek the truth out of earshot –
in the cavern of your chest.

Green pastures

Green pastures                                                                                    
 
Jesus left the ninety-nine to find the one lost
and maybe that one lost, if its story be told,
 
was the only one not left behind, but truly
found, scooped up in the Savior’s arms.
 
You have to get lost to be found, I think. 
You have to lose the flock,
 
go out on your own two shaky legs
into the dark fields, trading all there evidently is
 
for all that might be, short of any real evidence.
Thinking maybe of finding your own way if you must,
 
but not really caring anymore,
just tired to the bone of the painful,
 
the false and fleeting and at that moment
of utter despair and defeat, maybe
 
you get lifted up, or you die trying – and perhaps,
you get carried away, led – not back into the fold but safely
 
released onto those metaphorical green pastures
to fatten you up before your next adventure.
 
O child of God, to escape the counterfeit,
surround yourself with the Mystery.

Regarding the mystery

Regarding the mystery                                                                     
 
This language which I do not speak,
lately comes to me by way
 
of the great mystery no one comprehends
and so I remain silent mostly – better not
 
to understand, nor speak, this wisdom
than the human, understandable points
 
held forth daily, apparently far from any truth –
the constant parroting of love and mercy,
 
courage and virtue without the least authenticity
or reality behind the uttered words.
 
So perhaps better mere silence, refraining
from complicity, regarding the mystery
 
and its tenacious beauty, so terrible
and unimaginable – this Word, this God
 
unutterable on every human tongue,
this purported Oneness,
 
this homecoming along the inexhaustible,
unfathomable, inexpressible Way.
 
O child of God, you regret your silence
and then you regret your speech.