On the Ecology of Disappearances
Singers and Dancers Alike Say:
“All My Springs Are in You”
Psalm 87:7
It is a common experience among the human race that at some point in life, a person will interrupt our trajectory, in the quietest and most extraordinary ways. We are caught unawares, until our hand carelessly brushes their coat, or our wandering gaze trespasses into their eyes. Walks together to the chapel. A shared cup, shared body at the iron-wrought rail.
I discovered a fragment of myself in him, and he in me, at Mathias Sandwich Shop in a small, but growing town in South Carolina. My love for Peter became exhaustive and boundless.
And he loved me, despite the fact that he would have to leave the seminary and return to his homeland in six months.
Our brief time together was filled with whether to go to Garibaldi’s, watch the Olympics, or simply go for a long drive. But mostly there was intense conversation and fierce theological arguments—most everything was grounded in our mutual faith in Christ Jesus. Peter was an incredible intellect, challenging and nurturing. Because of him my faith deepened, and I have learned that in a relationship with roots in faith, even after long disappearances, love and memory can be sustained for a very long time.
Faith can be like art, an “other music”. Just as Peter and I were its singers and dancers, so are we all, in our own unique, even peculiar ways. And though he is thousands of miles away, I know that we are both still singing to the Lord our God:
All my springs are in you.
And Grace Rested
On the dark leafed trail,
dappled with gold,
my heavy feet
grew wings.
Streams wandering
for a thousand years
wandered
for another thousand,
without haste.
And grace rested,
everywhere,
over
all
the collapsing rain
the crumbling light
Wordfall
The ocean mist rises between your lines.
I wrap myself warm and fragrant
in silken syllables and
coriander consonants,
your patchwork syntax,
and laving wordfalls.
Speak to me in constellations
and I shall trace them
in diadems and diagrams,
for your words are stars to me.
They cascade in axial adjectives,
painting your feathered hands upon me,
as I strive to resist modifying the night
into something small and manageable.
Tenuous tenses float away,
and we are neither here nor there,
but between milliseconds,
pressed as a flower in the leaves
of a book,
our fragrance rising,
soon to vanish with the light.
Conjugate, love, this astral verb, spiraling galaxies,
let it slide through my gilded country, sparking flares,
until I am drenched by the rains of night.
From here the world is part parentheses,
wanting to enclose us, warm, in a furrow
waiting for a punctiliar preposition, when,
after all the loving, the words became
tangled, the conjugation confused,
the syntax unintelligible.
It became a language foreign.
A grammar unknown to me.
Yet your lines come to me still,
wrapped in the ocean’s mist.
Let us speak once more,
for it is ours for the trying,
together fashioning a grammar that hangs
from the evening’s watery lights.
The Shepherding Trees
The shepherding trees upon our hills render
a scene of flaming wing of Autumn’s descent,
Spring’s writhing, perishing song of lament
to which none will bow nor comfort tender.
Our ghosts are not seen upon those hills climbing.
Your houndstooth coat never hung upon a bough.
Never was there bark burned with our silent, secret vow,
pressed between the leaves of my memory, residing.
Unforgetting you makes a stronger tree these thirty years.
Love grows another ring, your absence pierces earth,
rising through the aperture, your sharp blade cuts the aging air.
At oceanside, my raven-coated lover stands, in tears;
We wrap ourselves around and around. My first birth.
I hold your absence. I mourn the Spring. I taste the withering pear.
And I Shall Never
on the ecology of disappearances
And I shall never hear your carol
raising up the trees of praise,
who yet in green veils of mourning
sigh, so remembering you,
O little warbler, whose voice sinks
deep, disappearing into the sod,
and floats soundless down the river
of unanswering sky.
Nowhere and everywhere,
such silence is cacophonous,
confounding the bereaved wail
of the evening loon,
a cry more yearning
than the great gray geese
in search of home
upon mythic fields.
And I shall never,
with feathered fingers,
caress his awned cheek—
the thievery of taloned years! —
yet his absence lies with me,
in the secret bed,
withholding nothing.
The Overtaking
The winged nymph alights
upon her greenly stage,
the blossom, waiting, trembling
before her rapturous sage light,
the dance ekstasis
of creature and nectar.
Sing, then the butterfly,
though such sweetness
she gathers, she cannot hold
the unbearable center,
for that grace which may
yet alight upon us,
overtaking us in slow,
tidal swells.
When Death Comes to Our Table
When Death comes to our table,
The distance separating us disappears.
The silken sash of rose shall fall
upon you, O rider pale,
and my passion flows from my thighs,
a river of orange blossoms that fall
over you.
The silken sash, once binding, now unbinding,
has freed us to know as we want to be known.
When Death comes to our table,
Love’s grief is falling upward.
In the Thousandth Silence
In the thousandth silence of you,
the Charleston shore has forgotten
my head in your shoulder, startling
the wind that weeps
for what passed between us
at the rim of a world
you had never seen
In the thousandth silence of you,
the abandoned storefronts are collapsing—
Your hand against my back—tremble
the bones that weep
for worlds passing between us
at the end of days,
an upwelling of the eternal
that we shall yet see—
in the thousandth silence
Hemispheres
What you say to me
is slow as stars
in coming
across hemispheres
no silence breaking
slake this umbral grief
with only
a rose
its fragrance perishing
over the red and calving sea
Can you see
distal light
from the chapel
Christe, Eleison
when the sainted sun
seared our alleluias
igniting
these diadems in Orion
a winter hourglass
sifting time
above me now
each apprehends the other
this night the sky
a slate of strange silence
my veilless wonderment
awe-beguiling
how memory bends
through hemispheres
of love waking slow
in the Beloved
The Sun Will Never Say
The sun is silent
She will not speak today
or on the morrow.
She will remember
the sweep of sunlight
upon the warm boulder
yet she shall not speak of it
She will remember the river skyward
in which we swam
and the bloom of the trillium
growing courageous
among the beaten mountain path
The sun will remember the tender motions
of flesh upon flesh
and of this
Wisdom’s sun will never say
the mystery
Taproot
You come with the winter tides,
when rivers flow slow
as a memory,
mocking
the young birch in the courtyard,
its life toiling,
subterranean and submitting
to the discipline of the Lord
A poverty of touch
is the substance of passion
love,
suffering and patient,
exhilaration
its taproot deeper
than those who sleep in the earth,
waiting in God
Summer is the awn of your cheek,
a shirt fraying
like time between us
Your laugh, an ascent
into some Slovak mountain range,
where I surrender my breath
beneath the evening’s tent of lace.
And in a corner dark
of the bending universe,
a star’s life is ending
in dust, gas, wind
the colliding light
This is How I Love You
Do you know how I love you?
I love you with no farewell,
yet with few expectations.
I love you from the deep spaces,
where lie the shimmering whale bones,
where burn the ancient mystic fires.
I love you as the red fern grows,
longing only to graze your skin as you pass.
I love you as I am wounded,
in your forgetting, in your silence.
Even as we are an impossibility,
“No chance” to me is something worth loving.
I love you and live with you
in the monochrome memories of beaches
and empty streets and dimly lit cafes.
My love was rageful when you left me.
I lay in the ashes that remained,
I burned as the cindered river,
but perished not,
Do you know how I love you?
My love is a broken fragrance
that sheds its aroma across the blue true sky,
5000 miles,
to perish at your door.
This is how I love you.
Some Nights
The striving city streets
were our shadowed paths
to a country of forgetting—
the next Sun, the next days
of surrendered light.
Yet swallows remember
the southland, and promises
kept there among
the wintering gardens.
The migrant moon spilt
the spangled harvest above us,
silent as sand.
Then the noon parting,
our brittling kiss a marigold
withering into concrete,
ashen paths remembered
only by the Sun.
Such Storms Dream
The sun may not sweep distant roads
in persimmon tresses,
yet there is wind-brushed rain,
susurrations among paradises strange
Remember such rapture, with no little fervor
let the bitterweed and blackthorn
howl
while the wren
is sentenced to the canopied chapel
where alleluias peal no more
A wandering prophet
breaks the cedars of my place—
with confessions of tenderness
and kiss of torrent flame,
burning trails seraphic,
mercy to secret springs
Such storms dream
of persimmon tresses—
he leaves me to fly
in mystic tirelessness
towards some distant ardor
no distance now exists
between wrensong
and the re-collecting earth.
Yet ever faithful I lie
bare to the trothless sky,
sentenced to my lover’s storm
of soundlessness
such torrent
and no re-collection
of the wandering paths
of his voice
Better than Before
After Elizabeth Barrett Browning
In other Carolina twilights
on my parents’ front porch swing,
I was cradled in wisteria
so velvet,
intoxicated,
raptured
Fourteen summers,
and the field left fallow
spoke to me
of winterings and turnings,
the underbelly
of dark Sheol,
the wrestling angels
and striving God
The honeysuckle grew
along the tiled porch,
stamen so strange,
nectared sun
melting in my mouth
as in a wilderness,
the End of Days
“How do I love thee?”
asked the poet.
Over the wilding field
I uttered her question:
“How do I love thee?”
To the honeysuckle
at my lips
I whispered:
“How do I love thee?”
To the depths
of Sheol’s stirrings
in my roiling earth,
I trembled:
“How do I love thee?”
I asked this of you,
a man yet nameless
in oceans and tides
that would bring you to me
from a world unknown,
my beloved,
my lover,
a mystery
veiled in faith
Tonight, a girl no longer,
I am a woman
with a book,
old binding long rent.
I still tremble,
and remember
every way that you feel,
sure and rocking and strong
like a front porch swing.
And every way that you taste,
are all my days,
golden and melting,
flesh upon flesh,
a kiss for the parting.
How do I love you?
With my body
I answered 10,000 times.
In my death
I will answer better
than before.
In Cloths of Heaven
On that day
at the fringes of last things
when silken ribbons
have been spun in full
and the earth has been turned
a thousand times
beyond
I shall meet you
in cloths of heaven
We shall rest
shining
among such gardens
no more forbidden
a kiss exchanging
just once
for an orange sweet
in the whisperings
of weft and warp
your name on my breath
beneath vaulting skies
a meal shared
in this windfall light
our alleluias
beginning
again