carpe poem #6

does art point to something? or can there be art for art's sake? there can almost be, for an artist who finds something beautiful or exceedingly terrible and does her best to plaster a patina of nice words to say things she doesn't really mean. if art didn't point to truth or beauty, or some ideal, why would someone make art? art isn't practical; art is ideal. And even if it was practical, like a hammer, that would only prove that it was made for something: hammering.

here is another poem. please take and eat like a scone.

-------

Aware

The sunrise splashes magma on the night

and I gaze to glean some light

as I drive on the thoroughfare,

this is prayer.

Frosted freckling on the glittering ground

crunch as I hear the sound

of cars turning with care, 

this is prayer.

My breath, like incense, white and heavy,

hovers by the Mr. Coffee, 

and the cream and sugar I prepare,

this, too, is prayer.

Now I sit at open table,

listing all I'm able

to do in this day's affair,

this is prayer.

And the approaching rush of self-rebukes,

of all my fakery and flukes,

strip me strengthless bare,

this is prayer.

Then comes distraction of distant fantasy, 

admired by fictive company,

doing that which I would not dare,

this is prayer.

Fidget of my chair and under watch by my boss, 

my legs I cross and recross,

I take a deep breath of air,

this is prayer.

This is prayer, to begin in foothills rough,

this is prayer in daily stuff,

in wherever I am made aware,

this is prayer.

carpe poem #5

I admit I have been slowing down. I've been distracted lately. It sometimes takes too much to try to write a poem, and it sometimes comes pouring out as easily as spilling water. Here is a poem I had worked on before. Thanks for reading.

---

Worm

I was sorry

to disturb the pale

body as I raked 

the overdue leaves.

Having made its bed

in the wet dark,

it had snacked on earth in secret

and earth, passing, covered it.  

Imagine its surprise

in being suddenly illuminated,

gasping like a root

green-shooted and denuded

to the unbearable atmosphere

that I commanded with my task. 

Imagine my surprise

in being thus discovered,

my appetite raked

up by His gardening work,

breathlessly squirming under

the saturated sky. 

Disposed to disposal, 

as dust is to dust,

in what earthen vessel

could I compost a most

fertile burrow while He, bending 

down, knuckles like mountains,

bowed His sun-face into my horizon,

and divined the number of my segments?

carpe poem #4

A happy new year to you all. Thanks for reading.

---

Scope

My father gifted me

with a microscope 

when I was young and curious,

the kind that used a mirror to shoot

light up through the slide and eyepiece

illuminating small letters of life

into galactic epigrams:

the bristles on the cricket leg:

a grove of trees after the snow has melted.

The vascularity of an oak leaf:

a cartographer's conundrum.

The glinting scale of a goldfish:

the gilded shields of a phalanx.

Little did he know, as did I,

that I was learning poetry

which I later studied by looking

at sonnet-slides under microscope

where a single line was a city,

a single word a home, 

and a single line break

the universe. 

But before I had studied,

while I was still bright-eyed, 

a friend graciously let me squint

through her telescope

one bright evening

this time at things which were so large

they gave off their own light

illuminating lens and my eyes

and this world,

breath-taking to see 

the numinous so near

fitting into the cradle of my palm

the abstract condensed with personality,

a star perched like a bird on a manger.

And when I wrote, and when I write,

I have one eye in the telescope

and the other in the microscope,

which explains why poetry at times

feels like vertigo, rising and falling, 

and trying to step away from this observatory,

I take a walk, muttering half-madly

into the wind that 

poetry is life

and life is a word.

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.

----

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. 


----


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. 

buffet or potluck

I love potlucks. It's kind of like meeting your neighbors. You're never sure of what you're going to get, but there is always some serving of mac salad or mashed potatoes. And, the containers! From tupperware to foil, to someone's grandma's favorite casserole dish inherited from her uncle. It is a smorgasbord.

Don't get me wrong, though. I also love buffets, although I tend to feel obliged to overeat at them. Everything in limitless supply before you, and there is usually something for everyone. These days, it isn't uncommon to see a buffet that has everything from sushi to sliced roast beef.

But I wasn't trying to talk about food or the social gathering around it. I mean to talk about the church and our membership within it.

I would like to think that what draws a lot of people to a church is what draws a lot of people to buffets. Great selection. Fantastic presentation. Seemingly endless supply of resources. Accessibility. A little something for everyone. It could even be multicultural.

But the primary difference between a potluck and a buffet is not necessarily the food or the selection, but it is what you bring to the table.

I understand my church to be more like a potluck. Actually, every church is a potluck. This is to say that the health, growth, vision, and character of a church community isn't something that is catered to them, but rather is what they--the individuals--bring to the table. How I prepare my own walk and devotion to Jesus is what I will be, in a sense, bringing with me to the congregational feast.

I freely admit that I have been a free-loader, coming to churches in times recent and times past where I just want to marinate in the steam that arises from the spiritual buffet trays. I've experienced retreats where some gifted preacher and praise team has prepared for me a sumptuous dish of spiritually spiced meats. And I've gobbled it all up.

But buffets aren't reproducible. And church then becomes a few head waiters cleaning up after the masses. So is it a wonder that when many of us expect a buffet--to fill up on what we ourselves failed to prepare--come to the communion table and find the spread meager and wanting? Our own personal devotion, our own practice in His kitchen, tasting and seeing that He is good--this is what is missing. We forgot that it was a potluck, and so everyone guiltily crowds around the mac salad and chips, and we go home still hungry.

What are you bringing to the table?

good in tensions

"As unto the bow the cord is,
So unto the man is woman,
Though she bends him, she obeys him,
Though she draws him, yet she follows,
Useless each without the other!"
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from The Song of Hiawatha, part 10

"In the same way, faith by itself, if not accompanied by action, is dead." - James 2:17


I was never in Boy Scouts, so I don't know much about bows and arrows. But I do know that those flimsy, plastic ones or the Nerf version that I used to play with are nothing compared to a real, English longbow. Reading about English longbows, made from a piece of yew wood about 6ft long, just made me feel like a little Camelot kid, brought me back to my wistful, medieval imagination. A longbow could fire an arrow over 200 yds easy. Range and power, which brought the Britons to victory.

photo credit: http://www.solarnavigator.net/sport/archery.htm

Power, because there is tension.

Perhaps why I find my faith to have little bearing on the weight of my real life is because I misunderstand tension. When I hear about faith being accompanied by action, I think of

believe the right things + do the right things = good life.

And I think of the good life as the easy, relaxed kind of life. Things ought to go my way when I get my theology right and I practice social justice, right?

But what if faith and action are not merely two parts of an equation, but are tensed together like the cord and the bow? What I mean is, sometimes our faith can stretch us only when we act, and sometimes our actions can only stretch us when we have faith. Which means sometimes our faith can be difficult. Our actions may prove to be costly.

Right before James 2:17, the scripture gives a real life example of faith without action: "go, I wish you well" without doing anything to provide for that to be a reality. It's a classic example of good intentions. But the other end, of merely doing good without faith, appears to be a contradiction. How do you "do good" without believing what that "good" is?

I don't have clear answers. But I think that being strictly "answers only" or a "questions only" seems to me a powerless kind of life, a piece of wood rotting on the ground. String tangled in a mess. But maybe there is something in seeing the cross as nailed together by mercy and judgment, earth as a battleground between heaven and hell. I myself, a mix of sinner and saint. Simul justus et peccator.

If Romans 7 is right, then a Christian's spiritual life is always in tensions. It's not about resolving that tension (cutting the string, breaking the bow), but living in that tension well. To grieve well when I sin, to rejoice well when I triumph in Christ.

Lord, let me not be numb.

I want to have more than good intentions. I want to be good in tensions.

running on E

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled." (Jesus)


You and I know the terrifying glare of the indicator light.

(photo credit: http://spiralwayjsj.blogspot.com/2012/01/running-on-empty.html)

I drive a Prius, and when the fuel gauge is on E, the last indicator bar blinks repeatedly. The fact that I can still get 50 miles on my last gallon is inconsequential. Its insistent blinking, while on the periphery of my vision, annoys me to the point of desperation. I am afraid that when I go up a hill, the little fuel I have left won't make it into the fuel injector and my car will cough and sputter to a stop.

But when I fill up the tank, comfort and ease flood into my life. Thus, I can drive without worry for at least the rest of the week. It's kind of like mood swings. Or the spiritual life. You and I both want it to be full so that we can grow with ease. But is that really how it is supposed to be?

Which makes me wonder: how is it that spiritual "fuel" gets spent? And how do I "refuel"? Am I ever certain of how much spiritual power there is in me? My thinking about this has changed recently, thanks to the Beatitudes.

Spiritual fuel, I think, is that zeal that gets spent when I am determined to pray, to read my Bible, to help others. I used to think that it was a kind of eagerness that stirred within me. And when I didn't sense that drive, maybe I thought I needed a revival, a refilling. So, I would go to retreats, or pick up a new devotional book, or visit any other spiritual pit stop in my attempt to refuel. My spiritual life has been this constant battle against emptiness.

But maybe Jesus has been telling me something different, something paradoxical, which most likely means that it is true.

All this time I have been talking and thinking about my spiritual life as if it something I need to maintain (like the fuel level in my car). It's a constant, uphill struggle. But what Jesus says here is that those who declare a spiritual bankruptcy, those who are completely spent on their own righteousness--they will be filled with riches of Christ's righteousness.

I think Lewis is right when he wrote in his Letters to Malcolm: "I have a notion that what seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling and contend with the greatest disinclination. For these, perhaps, being nearly all will, come from a deeper level than feeling."

Maybe God is weaning me away from these fossil fuels to alternative (altar-native?) forms of energy. (Sorry. I'll stop.) Or maybe it is a weaning away from the concept of fuel and drive and progression in general. Could God be pleased especially when I still choose to worship and praise and pray when I am running on empty? Could this be the real engine of spiritual living?

The indicator light tells me I need something. And if it is on all the time, I think that's a good thing for me: to know that I constantly need God. Needing Him, instead of using Him.

Mourning has broken

"Anger is the besetting temptation of those who have begun to see things clearly." (Evagrius)

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." (Jesus)


Of course, I am not angry. I am just an Asian American Christian male, who has been told by my culture and sub-cultures that I cannot be angry, that I cannot even be sad, and that I have to keep it together. Angry just doesn't cover it. I am repressed, lonely, and seething. I am wretched. Lord have mercy.

I am discovering that I haven't learned to mourn, that I haven't learned to cry. I have never learned to accept myself, or to believe in myself. These things I have had to learn only pretty recently, and I found that I am poor student. A poor student in the deep, personal things.

I don't want to rant or to bleed sentimentality. But I know that if I tell the truth, then I somehow find myself in the chorus of voices that whisper the truth. I know that humility only comes through honesty, or rather that there is no difference between honesty and humility. Christians talk about humility, and I want to talk humble. I want to tell you who I am, but I cannot do that fully. At least not yet.

I did a google image search on "mourning," and I kept finding pictures of these butterflies called "Mourning Cloaks."

Their name reminded me of something. They reminded me of those veils women wear when in mourning, which had always struck me as slightly ironic. I had thought it was an effort to "hide" one's mourning, which, however, would only draw more attention to themselves. But that is a perspective of someone outside the veil. Perhaps the veil is not for the world, but for the mourner. What I am saying is, seeing through a veil from the view of the mourner is seeing, paradoxically, clearly. Partially blind and through a grim, fragmentary mesh, the world seems dim and broken. Incomplete. And that is largely the truth.

And maybe this is a stretch here, but if brokenness is on the way to wholeness, and honesty on the way to brokenness, then this veiled picture of the world, of society, of myself is exactly the semi-opaque chrysalis into which I must go before transformation will happen.

Okay. My sentimentality just dipped into poetics. I can't help it. I am a jar. And mourning has broken.

On a theme developed by Jeong-Mung Ju (1337-1392)

(From his poem on death)

This body dies, a hundred deaths a day, dies,

slumbering in surrender, rising to its demise

to be true to You, Lord, or it lies.

The original poem:

이몸이 죽고 죽어 일백 번 고쳐 죽어

백골이 진토되어 넋이라도 있고 없고

임 향한 일편 단심이야 가실 줄이 있으랴.

Should this body die and die again a hundred times over,

White bones turning to dust, with or without trace of soul,

My steadfast heart toward Lord, could it ever fade away?

(credit: Wikipedia pages)

"And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out." - Mk. 9:47

When I give up something that I know causes me to sin, it must be a loss. It wouldn't be a sacrifice if it wasn't close to me. But to sacrifice a small thing--even a big thing--for an eternal good: is this a sacrifice or is this a key? Jesus hates my sin because He loves me, the sinner. I need a different definition of wholeness, if indeed it is better to enter life blind, maimed, crippled, poor, than to be whole and destroyed.

"I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!" - Mk. 9:24

The gospel doesn't get as personal to me by my beliefs as by my unbeliefs.

The statement, "Jesus saved me," really only makes sense when you know from what you need to be saved. It's impossible to grow deep roots when the you are potted in the strictures of your unbelief, when instead you are meant to be flourishing by streams of water. Resurrection makes sense only to the dead.

improv situation

So it is noticeable that my blogging frequency has taken a nose-dive in the past two months. I refuse to say that my life has become busier. Even more, I dismiss any usage of aphoristic cliche as my excuse, like, I've just had my plate full. I was never meant to finish everything on it anyway, at least not by myself.

What I will say is this. My life is now something completely different. When I got married, this was the case. (To my single brothers: married life is not single life + a roommate who happens to be a girl.) It wasn't that my plate got piled on with more of the same; it was instead a whole new etiquette, a whole new menu, and the table was certainly larger.

But now, not only am I married (and happily so for 1 year and five months), I am now a foster parent to three teenaged children. Just to tell you about them would require another whole season of blogging. Maybe I will just do that. So the table has become quite a bit bigger and more multicultural. Now we have Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese being spoken in the house.

And all of this just happened so quickly. Which reminds me of what a professor mine told me when I broke the news to him. He said that Christians need to know how to improvise. We know the script (the Word), and we've done some rehearsing, but when something unexpected happens, how do we respond?

Who knows. Maybe when you're done reading this post, something or someone may come your way, your chance to entertain angels/angles.

yaking about yakima fruit market

I meant to compose this when the Yakima Fruit Market (YFM) in Bothell was still open. It is closed from November to March because the weather is too frigid to sell produce outside.

But let me minute-rave about YFM.

Just as you round the Bothell-Everett Highway on the north end of Lake Washington, almost out of nowhere, Yakima Fruit Market appears like an oasis. It is difficult to find good parking because it's right next to the road, but any space will do. There are two parts to the market: an uncovered portion and a covered portion. The uncovered space usually displays the market's seasonal items, including locally grown prize pumpkins, Washington Christmas trees, Easter decorations, and the like. It is an airy foyer to the main goods of the place. The products advertise themselves.

Then you venture into the covered part of YFM where there are rows and rows of local apples, berries, garlic, squash, fennel, leeks, etc. The whole panoply of produce is on the display, of course, in local quantities and without much of the wax that is used in grocery stores. Candy logs, honey sticks, and the usual dried fruit and canned goods are located further back. And the entire place has the faint sweet smell of a waking orchard. These are free range fruits and vegetables, uncaged and vegetarian-fed.

But what I appreciate most about the market is the people who work there. I cannot remember their names, but their presence is a familiar and comforting one. They have the presence of nurses in a, well, nursery ward: incredibly knowledgeable about each of their patients, busy, but never too busy to stop and tell you a good story or joke. I remember this one young lady with strong arms, tattoos fading, who shared that her favorite apple variety was Jonagold. It was she who informed me that Jonagolds have the color and tartness of a Jonathan apple and the starchiness and sweetness of a Golden Delicious. Hence, Jonagold! I didn't even know Jonathan apples existed. (And where, then, are the David apples? They need to make a cameo appearance...) She knew what she was talking about, and by her frame, I could tell that she probably had picked many of these apples herself.

YFM is one reason why I love local. They're so connected to what they do, from starch to finish. They have a rootedness, and they give life to those who come. When you buy from YFM, you're not just bringing home delicious produce at decent prices. You've entered a context. You know what has come before. You know where you are. You know where it's going. You bring home more of what it is: home.

what is a church for?

I'm no Wendell Berry or Alice Waters, but I sometimes wish I could be the Korean American male version of some hybrid of both. I think it is time that we stop seeing the church as a place to go and more of a mode of being. In short, I want a real local church.

There is enough distancing and disintegration in our lives. The weekdays from the weekend. The friends from the co-workers. The inner from the outer life. Not that boundaries aren't important, but what is it that holds a life together?

If church is the vessel through which people meet God, grasp the gospel, find fellowship, team up together, what are we saying when we say, "I go to church"? Is there a point where you don't? I mean, in its essence? What has happened, I believe and lament, is that our churches have become too disconnected from our neighborhoods and our communities. My fellow pastor-friend Ben Park said something to the effect, "we must guard against our churches becoming country clubs." Church is not a country club. It is neither a kind of separatist country that secludes itself until the End, nor is it a club used to beat moral sense into society. My church shall not be an escape pod from planet Earth.

Nor shall I countenance a church that sanctimoniously sanctions the status quo. (Ooh. A church in tension: intention?)

But I will be a part of a church that serves, lives, and dies for the people around it, the locals, the natives. I will be a part of a church that has real good news, and it will be right under our noses.

When there is no vision, the people perish. But when there is a vision, the people parish.

songs sung when you can't sing

singe the wick

of my candlestick

when there is no more tallow

sneak in the oil

your secret toil

when I feel shallow

shear these limbs

for your whims

or let me lie fallow

sore throat

The cold rain of Seattle

Lack of sleep due to trip to Portland

+ General sense of fatigue this past month

______________________________________

An unexpected reminder of my frailty,

which, when I subtract my strengths anyway,

there is still a kind of bonus that doesn't add up.

Even on this side of equilibrium,

I am being given the gift of myself,

a dissolution of the divisions of my life.

I am bread and fish broken, but

in order to be fruitful and multiply.

As I sip on this derivative of ginseng

to ease my throat, being full of phlegm,

I wonder at how sickness sometimes sucks

dry my moistened ambition and makes

me more integral, whole, and greater than

by being less than all this.

the art of justice

I recently ate at a buffet in Lynnwood and had to roll myself out of the double doors. Thinking back on it, I had to blame, if not myself, then the food. The food was just so good-looking and tasty.

Which got me thinking about basic necessities.

If someone who was poor was given everything he needed in order to survive--that is, food and shelter, even some company--but it did not include something called beauty, would his existence truly be human? If his food came to him in some paper bag, all mashed up into one blob of grub, yes, we could still say that he is being sustained, but would that be justice? We could give him a roof over his head and clothe him in the most holey of holeys, but would he have any standing among us?

In other words, justice and mercy cannot just mean the meanest of a livelihood, the bare scraps to scrape through the day. Justice is wedded to dignity and beauty--the opportunity to share. I think it unconscionable to practice the art of justice without the luscious brushstrokes of jubilee. Justice without beauty is like painting the rainbow with only black and white.

beet poetry

There is no doubt of the connection

between food and poetry.

A well-cooked meal is a muse--

paeans on paella, scones of scorn,

the turn of verse as marinated

steaks sear with grill lines,

the iamb from shaking sea salt on lamb.

Good food renders us speechless and,

in that moment, the ingredients for poetry.

The poet, like the chef, wakes up in the morning

and goes to the market, finding choice

and fresh edibles, before the others get to them.

We could live off of intravenous

glucose pumped into our stomachs,

pre-digested concepts that pass for food,

sustenance that does merely that: sustain.

We could shuffle off our mortal coils

without ever having crispy onion rings

or kielbasa covered in sauerkraut.

We could manage with newspaper

fat, tablets of tabloids, three-second

sound bites, snippets that impress upon us

less speech rather than leaving us speechless,

the instantly accessible loaf of banality.

We could,

but we find room, always room,

for that everyday indulgence,

for that which is utterly beautiful,

for that which sings

like bread still quivering from the oven.

Once you have tasted gourmet,

there's only one way.

Once a verse touches your language,

salts your understanding, brightens your eyes

like honey does after a fast,

you know what hunger and poverty is.

O how much flavor, breadth, and depth we lack!

How little we feast and how much we snack!

O beet poet, standing on stage

reading your recipe for life,

peppered with reality, looking at us

with your glazed glare,

stop starving art with your open mic-

rowaved slam.