carpe poem #3

Consciousness and conscience.
I have been reading lately Foster's book on Prayer, and I find that the prayers I tend to avoid are those that look inward. I like every other room in the house, except my closet space. Why is that? And when I do peer inward, sometimes it is so messy that all I want to do is throw everything into an incinerator. Other times it is easy to justify my room. But what if God speaks through you, to you? What if the most significant patterns of God's love are woven into the fabric of your own life? God wastes nothing.

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Couch

I sank in cushions

shushed in light incandescent

from three lamps on the periphery

of this couched enclosure. 

I did not feel lazy or drowned

in drowse that mid-afternoon showers

incant when winter descends

hushing the suburbs

dousing the hubbub.

There was, instead, a liveliness,

an ecstatic cling of peace

cradling me in its sling.

While I was fitted hobbit-snug

with book and coffee mug

I was unfocused of them

as though someone had sown

a question and my response

had just begun to grow.

And how could I answer

anything without being so reposed

in living room, nooked in felt

sling, furling in understanding,

slung for schemes sprung

stones flung and verses sung 

versus these toweringly uncertain

titans and curses?

How could I begin but being

idle before I dole and mete 

out un-mittened, smitten

demolition

of these gods and idols?

carpe poem #2

Let poems be what they are, speak into context-less contexts, blank pages of life. I think poems are context-creating things, putting frames on life, which is why I think so many poems are about nature, because nature frames us these days. How many of our forests and groves and copses now border our neighborhoods and city limits? Bodies of water? Okay, poetic rambling ends here. 

Here is another poem. 


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Stronghold

I have set its hedges down

where you would trip,

dug the moat where you would 

drown and muddle in diplomacy,

and if you were far

off, I have poised the trebuchets on your

position, reaching into old tensions, 

so that if you advanced,

weakened with that volley, I could signal

the indefensible archers emoting from intelligent

parapets bearing impossible standards, 

and if you rammed close

so that I could see my name on your lips,

my bowels would be moved, cauldrons

of scoria slagging over so consuming that 

even my defenses begin to char and change

out of desperation, knowing the condition

that this castle's keep will not, cannot, keep

and what I cannot keep, for some reason,

without end, without reason, I will die to defend. 

Daily Poems

For the last few weeks, I've been trying to do what I did in college for a quarter: write a poem a day. Of course, maybe only one of out five poems are actually worth reading. But they all have been worth writing. So, I think I may post my favorite poem of the week, once a week. Here goes.

Carpe poem.


----

Recital

At night, if I can hear past 

the static of traffic, the vehicular whooshes, 

I can perceive the leaves warming up wood-

wind wayward warbles, susurrus fast,

now slow and low beneath the tender twine tunings

of maple, apple, pine. 

They are rehearsing for the morning concert,

performing ordinances set before time, when time

signatures held their authorial sway and way, 

way before it was called night and day. 

There was a Voice in the seasons

that sung into motion stallion clouds, clung

dew to trifoliate clover, flung the constellation

into sky-sea, rippling melodies from rain-drops

that have fallen on my thinning hair, clods of hair

pointing out my anointing.

In these songs sung without tongue,

but hummed in heart, what part 

will I harmonize with, with what end

shall I start as though I had never started,

never ended, never parted?

So at night, as I distinguish these sounds, 

distilling them into coherence, hearing

the mild breathing and stirring of the woman

you have given me, herself warming up for her

tomorrow, the silence before the silences, 

perhaps this night, my heart has had its last rehearsal.