Hiatus

Blogging hiatus upcoming

from this evening until late Thursday.

Sestina at 20

Make ready for the coming of the spring!
Away with all those memories of pain!
A world begins where few thoughts are final.
Through rayed blue skies the shining seagulls plunge
Suddenly, as if to halt a crisis
Wherein the land thickens with strange green growth.

Patches of earth, so long unused to growth,
Are now faced with the happy threat of spring:
A sweet disturbance and a welcome crisis,
A dangerous thrill, a pleasurable pain.
Green stems soar into light; careful roots plunge
Fingers into darkness whose face is final.

Winter had a way of seeming final,
Excluding possibilities of growth.
Snowflakes fell; the mercury took its plunge.
We waited for the necessary spring
To melt the brace of icy pain
Which placed our hearts in subzero crisis.

In each new weather, twittering in crisis,
Brisk sparrows gather in trees that are final
On branches that tremble in frequent pain.
We hear crisp notes, exclamations of growth --
How do we take the temperature of spring?
How deeply into subsoil must we plunge?

Answer: We deal in surfaces, no plunge
Involved in calculating our crisis.
It is spring when the wind says it is spring;
The sentence of our skin and pulse is final.
We know we have achieved our sought-for growth
In the smooth scour of sunlight when our pain

Of winter changes into sweeter pain.
Love menaces us and we take the plunge;
We gamble on joy's exponential growth,
Oblivious of a round-the-corner crisis.
"But hope is endless, fear is never final,"
Hints the blunt dusk. We feel the sting of spring

And thus does spring remind us of our pain.
Summer makes it final. The brief nights plunge
Our blood into a crisis we call growth.

Quotation

Even in the darkness of mortal sin, faith is constantly preaching.

Fr Frederick Faber, via Groeschel, Healing the Original Wound, p. 57

Night

Small hush.
World grows dark,
dusk deep.

Trees stand
stark, tall. Hills
crave sleep.

Keep still.
Make life a
curled stone.

Peace comes plain to
the loved soul's home.

Need for words,
for cares of
the quick, there
is no more.

1991

Syesha

To change gears somewhat

Why is she always in the bottom three?

Fr Groeschel

God is full of compassion, always looking for some way to reach the lost and forsaken. Don't try to understand how God will save somebody else. Cardinal John Henry Newman pointed out that the grace that suits one person is not the grace that suits another. We have no right to say how and when and where God will lead another person to salvation. The ways by which perfection is reached reflect infinite variety. Our wounded souls require very different medicines. God can even lead a person by means of his or her weakness and sin.

Benedict J. Groeschel, CFR, Healing the Original Wound (Ann Arbor: Servant Publications, 1993), p. 35

Quotation

In the presto of the morning, Crispin trod

Wallace Stevens, from "The Comedian as the Letter C"

Roethke

A Rouse for Stevens
by Theodore Roethke (1908-63)

(To Be Sung in a Young Poets' Saloon)

Wallace Stevens, what's he done?
He can play the flitter-flad;
He can see the second sun
Spinning through the lordly cloud.

He's imagination's prince:
He can plink the skitter-bum;
How he rolls the vocables,
Brings the secret -- right in Here!

Wallace, Wallace, wo ist er?
Never met him, Dutchman dear;
If I ate and drank like him,
I would be a chanticleer.

Speak it from the face out clearly:
Here's a mensch but can sing dandy.
Er ist niemals ausgepoopen,
Altes Wunderkind.

Roar 'em, whore 'em, cockalorum,
The Muses, they must all adore him,
Wallace Stevens -- are we for him?
Brother, he's our father!

Swearing

I'm too nice

Via Dyspeptic Mutterings:

Schoolhouse Rock

The preamble

Yes, from Schoolhouse Rock, the '70s educational series of cartoons. This being Patriots' Day Week (forgive the awkward phrasing) in Massachusetts, I suppose I should post "The Shot Heard 'Round the World," but this tune is catchier. Three minutes:

Verlaine

Mandoline
by Paul Verlaine (1844-96)

Les donneurs de sérénades
Et les belles écouteuses
Echangent des propos fades
Sous les ramures chanteuses.

C'est Tircis et c'est Aminte,
Et c'est l'éternel Clitandre,
Et c'est Damis qui pour mainte
Cruelle fait maint vers tendre.

Leurs courtes vestes de soie,
Leurs longues robes à queues,
Leur élégance, leur joie
Et leurs molles ombres bleues

Tourbillonnent dans l'extase
D'une lune rose et grise,
Et la mandoline jase
Parmi les frissons de brise.

_______________


(The givers of serenades and the lovely women who listen exchange insipid words under the singing branches.

There is Thyrsis and Amyntas and there's the eternal Clytander, and there's Damis who, for many a cruel woman, wrote many a tender verse.

Their short silk coats, their long dresses with trains, their elegance, their joy and their soft blue shadows,

whirl around in the ecstasy of a pink and grey moon, and the mandolin prattles among the shivers from the breeze.)

Hot

Close to eighty (27° C.) tomorrow

Let there be sung Non nobis and Te Deum.

By somebody else, not me.

Meme

Touched by an angel?
Almost! Tagged with a meme!

(tagged by alias clio)

What I was doing ten years ago: Answering phones, and updating baptismal records, and straightening out files in an inner-city rectory.

Three things on my To-Do list today: Dinner; go to Chelsea; listen to my favorite nighttime talk show on the radio.

Things I would do if I were a billionaire: Give a fraction to charity, take care of relatives, and probably become dissolute.

Three of my bad habits: Verbosity, laziness, junk food.

Five places I've lived: Somerville, East Boston, Amherst, Chelsea and here. All in Massachusetts, New England, USA.

Six jobs I've had: Clerical temp work; a few days at a CVS; a few days at an Au Bon Pain; ice-cream scooper (three months); security guard (close to two years); the rectory thing (a couple of years).

Five books I've recently read:
1. Dakota by Kathleen Norris
2. Reflections on the Psalms by C S Lewis
3. Women and the Priesthood, ed. Thomas Hopko (1983 edition)
4. Thomas Merton: Master of Attention by Robert Waldron
5. 100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda

Coffee

need coffee

Dakota: A Spiritual Geography by Kathleen Norris
a few disorganized comments

Something of a mixed bag, more good than bad. The book likens the experience of living in the western Dakotas to that of monasticism. Some poetry in prose as she enthuses over the landscape, and her occasional visits to a nearby Benedictine monastery. (Norris is a Presbyterian.) The book is marred by some digressions on economics that may have seemed necessary to the author, but which did not magnetize this reader; also, there are some remarks about her fellow townspeople (their provincialism, their being "set in their ways") that seem to flirt with "Snobama"-type elitism. There is the incredible claim on p. 210 that the Benedictine order predates "the Catholic hierarchy" -- to employ the popular code, whiskey tango foxtrot? But Norris's genuine affection for the monks, for the landscape, and (yes) for most of her neighbors, does come through and make us forget the flaws. Almost.

On the Amazon scale of five stars, this book was about a three-point-nine.

Weighed and found (overweight but) wanting

That sums up my life to date! It's the Six-Word Memoir Meme, via The Digital Hairshirt. (A cool blog where you can go back in time to the 1970s with the Bee Gees, Donna Summer, and the late Van McCoy.)

The Daily Eudemon

has given us lists of things that are difficult, very difficult, and downright impossible to say while drunk. (Scroll down a wee bit.) Yes, #5 under Downright Impossible is quite true.

Seen

Written in the book of prayer petitions next to a statue of Our Lady in a Cambridge, Mass. church:

Inspirez B.H.O. qu'il désiste de son ambition et qu'il cède la place à H.R.C.

(Inspire B.H.O. to give up his ambition and yield to H.R.C.)

No comment!

Official business

Raises a vexed index to her chin, wondering she is, if she forgot to tell the mind, the man behind, the man behind the desk, with the name, with the big name, something.

74-77 degrees

The expected high temperature today (away from the water). I'll cope somehow.

Wilde

Eve alerts us to an essay by the Cigarette Smoking Blogger about Oscar Wilde: his aesthetics, sexuality, and eventual conversion to Catholicism.

But the most obvious fact about praise -- whether of God or anything -- strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honour. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. The world rings with praise -- lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game -- praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. I had not noticed how the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds, praised most, while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least. The good critics found something to praise in many imperfect works; the bad ones continually narrowed the list of books we might be allowed to read. The healthy and unaffected man, even if luxuriously brought up and widely experienced in good cookery, could praise a very modest meal: the dyspeptic and the snob found fault with all. Except where intolerably adverse circumstances interfere, praise almost seems to be inner health made audible. [...] I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: "Isn't she lovely? Wasn't it glorious? Don't you think that magnificent?" The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about. My whole, more general, difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can't help doing, about everything else we value.

C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, pp. 93-95

Am resisting

the urge to quote at further length from the chapter entitled "A Word about Praising" in C S Lewis's book Reflections on the Psalms. The tempting excerpt runs about two pages (from the bottom of page 93 to the beginning of page 96); a shorter excerpt would not do justice to Lewis's thought.

So, what to do? The choices are (1) Post a shorter excerpt; (2) Transcribe the whole blessed thing; (3) Neither -- simply recommend, exhort, urge!

Find a copy and, even if you are disinclined to purchase, read the chapter in question (pp. 90-98), and admire.

(I'll probably post some part of it soon.)

Today's feast

St Benedict Joseph Labre.

Wikipedia page.

From EWTN.

And New Advent's Catholic Encyclopedia entry.

Cummings

if up's the word;and a world grows greener
minute by second and most by more--
if death is the loser and life is the winner
(and beggars are rich but misers are poor)
--let's touch the sky:
                              with a to and fro
(and a here there where)and away we go

in even the laziest creature among us
a wisdom no knowledge can kill is astir--
now dull eyes are keen and now keen eyes are keener
(for young is the year;for young is the year)
--let's touch the sky:
                              with a great(and a gay
and a steep)deep rush through amazing day

it's brains without hearts have set saint against sinner;
put gain over gladness and joy under care--
let's do as an earth which can never do wrong does
(minute by second and most by more)
--let's touch the sky:
                              with a strange(and a true)
and a climbing fall into far near blue

if beggars are rich(and a robin will sing his
robin a song)but misers are poor--
let's love until noone could quite be(and young is
the year,dear)as living as i'm and as you're
--let's touch the sky:
                              with a you and a me
and an every(who's any who's some)one who's we

What do we mean when we say that a picture is "admirable"? We certainly don't mean that it is admired (that's as may be) for bad work is admired by thousands and good work may be ignored. Nor that it "deserves" admiration in the sense in which a candidate "deserves" a high mark from the examiners -- i.e., that a human being will have suffered injustice if it is not awarded. The sense in which the picture "deserves" or "demands" admiration is rather this; that admiration is the correct, adequate or appropriate, response to it, that, if paid, admiration will not be "thrown away", and that if we do not admire we shall be stupid, insensible, and great losers, we shall have missed something. In that way many objects both in Nature and in Art may be said to deserve, or merit, or demand, admiration. It was from this end, which will seem to some irreverent, that I found it best to approach the idea that God "demands" praise. He is that Object to admire which (or, if you like, to appreciate which) is simply to be awake, to have entered the real world; not to appreciate which is to have lost the greatest experience, and in the end to have lost all. The incomplete and crippled lives of those who are tone deaf, have never been in love, never known true friendship, never cared for a good book, never enjoyed the feel of the morning air on their cheeks, never (I am one of these) enjoyed football, are faint images of it.

C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, p. 92

Now they watch him and cringe.
Who are they? Who is he?

We decided to fly Chinese.
The food wasn't that good.

And oh Erwin did I tell you
that man -- the one -- I didn't

know if I was supposed to or not.
He crawled back listlessly,

holding a bunch of divas.

John Ashbery, from "As Umbrellas Follow Rain"

Bring on the aromatherapy
boys there's a job to get done

John Ashbery, from "Intricate Fasting"

Two bumper stickers
on the same car

EMBRACE LOVE

KEEP ABORTION LEGAL

[...] how constantly Our Lord repeated, reinforced, continued, refined, and sublimated, the Judaic ethics, how very seldom he introduced a novelty. This of course was perfectly well-known -- was indeed axiomatic -- to millions of unlearned Christians as long as Bible-reading was habitual. Nowadays it seems to be so forgotten that people think they have somehow discredited Our Lord if they can show that some pre-Christian document (or what they take to be pre-Christian) such as the Dead Sea Scrolls has "anticipated" Him. As if we supposed Him to be a cheapjack like Nietzsche inventing a new ethics! Every good teacher, within Judaism as without, has anticipated Him. The whole religious history of the pre-Christian world, on its better side, anticipates Him. It could not be otherwise. The Light which has lightened every man from the beginning may shine more clearly but cannot change. The Origin cannot suddenly start being, in the popular sense of the word, "original".

C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958), pp. 26-27

"You obviously have a wonderful economy with words, Gloria. I look forward to your next syllable with great eagerness."

Sir John Gielgud, who played Hobson in Arthur, was born 104 years ago today.

Happy 69th birthday ...

... to Seamus Heaney!

Quiz

via Oblique House

You Are a Hazelnut

You are very unique and distinct. You may even freak some people out. Most people don't really know how to interact with you. You get along best with anyone who is super sweet. But you really do get along with almost anyone. You just need a chance to wow them.

What Nut Are You?

Cummings

darling!because my blood can sing
and dance(and does with each your least
your any most very amazing now
or here)let pitiless fear play host
to every isn't that's under the spring
--but if a look should april me,
down isn't's own isn't go ghostly they

doubting can turn men's see to stare
their faith to how their joy to why
their stride and breathing to limp and prove
--but if a look should april me,
some thousand million hundred more
bright worlds than merely by doubting have
darkly themselves unmade makes love

armies(than hate itself and no
meanness unsmaller)armies can
immensely meet for centuries
and(except nothing)nothing's won
--but if a look should april me
for half a when,whatever is less
alive than never begins to yes

but if a look should april me
(though such as perfect hope can feel
only despair completely strikes
forests of mind,mountains of soul)
quite at the hugest which of his who
death is killed dead. Hills jump with brooks:
trees tumble out of twigs and sticks;

It seems to me that the Church was actually resisting conformity to this world in her practice of ordaining only certain of her baptized men to the presbyteral/episcopal office. The societies in which the Church lived, in both the old and new covenants, certainly knew female leadership. Israel itself had women judges and queens, as did the empires and nations in which Christianity developed and reigned as the "official religion." But even in times when women ruled empires and were consecrated by the [Orthodox] Church for this purpose and were canonized saints by the same Church for their successful service, there were no women priests or bishops in the Church. The question is, why not? And the answer, it seems to me, can only be because the Church has theological and spiritual reasons for her actions, which are intended to preserve, and not to deny, her eschatological character.

The Church exists in the world to proclaim and preserve a vision of God and the world, and a vision of men and women, within the fallen conditions of this age whose form is passing away (1 Co 7:31). Essential to this vision is the conviction that human nature images the nature of God within the conditions of creation in two forms: masculine and feminine. It insists that men and women are essentially identical in their humanity, but are not interchangeable in their completion and perfection of it. And it holds that there must be in the Church, since it does not always exist in the world, the clear expression of the distinction of the sexes in their mutual fulfilment through communion in love, which has nothing to do with privilege, power, prestige and authority. It is therefore the sign of the Church's ultimate resistance to this world -- her calling not to be "conformed to this world" but to be "transformed by the renewal of ... mind" in order to demonstrate "what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect" (Rm 12:2) -- that the Church has not ordained women to her priestly and episcopal ranks.

Thomas Hopko, "Women and the Priesthood: Reflections," in Women and the Priesthood (SVS Press, 1983 edition), pp. 188-9

I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life -- tall, slim, auburn hair, uptilted nose, lovely mouth and the most enormous grey eyes I had ever seen. It really happened the way it does when written by the worst lady novelists. ... I goggled. I had difficulty swallowing and had champagne in my knees.

David Niven, describing his first encounter with his second wife, in The Moon's A Balloon

via Wikipedia

We must not shut our hearts against desire, but learn how to desire rightly, so that our whole wanting apparatus can be healed, so that eventually it will find its full satisfaction in him who alone can satisfy us. We cannot learn to love God by learning not to love. If we kill off in ourselves the faculty we have for desire, then we shall paralyze our faculty for loving God. [...] God is not just the policeman trying to keep us in order, or the examiner waiting to see our papers; he is also the great seducer, wooing us into his paradise of delights, so that his own joy may be in us, and our joy may be full.

Simon Tugwell, OP, from Prayer: Living with God (Templegate, 1975), pp. 43-44

via Magnificat, May 2008

Smith & Hawken

A park bench by the Belvedere. The Pocket Book of Modern Verse.

58 degrees

The loathsome sun, the mute inglorious mud. The glorious clouds, celestial teeming earth.

The scampering ram

and endless tankards of ale, or pitchers of Diet Coke. Recovering reliability.

Am feeling

quite expended. Will continue.

Neptune is a road

on the east side, on the blue line. Princeton is a street, and Eagle is a square.

Let noon, let midday

come today at five past eleven, at fifty-four minutes till twelve.

Post

your poems soon. They are strange and quiet and merciful.

Line from a journal, September 1997

the fractional magnificence of a dream ...

A package of mythology

A packet of bliss.

2003

Tardy reveille

On a Saturday.
Rain in the big bean.
April's endless pour.
Coffee's second mug.
Sommeil évanoui.
Sit we, do not stride.
Vigil Mass at four.
Several hours away.
Wood and dust and books.
Bending low, desk-lamp.
Icon smiles upon
Our inchoate words.

Greetings to moptop!

2003

Ashberyana

flowers in the packet-boat
tulips from Utrecht

*

vintage nineteen ninety-eight
syrupy splotches

*

bleak patois of mercredi
fourth cup of coffee

*

homeboys sipping Montrachet
in the bee-loud glade

*

newly-minted reveries
drams of nostalgia

*

like a flummoxed kitty-cat
on the mantelpiece

*

in the gloaming happy schmucks
brave a morris-dance

*

staining prim South Hadley's lawns
with their drips and streaks

*

haply the widow'd songster
pours his plaint, selah

*

common reasons sway the herd
into buoyancy

*

where busboys traipse, there traipse I
in a cowslip's bell

*

dribble from the chandelier
woozy drops of light

2003

phos hilaron updated

with a reading from St Ephrem the Syrian

Oh, definitely tomorrow

Pat Buchanan chops meat! Film at 11.

Postprandial

Seurat's mustard. Pointillism of the chemise. Adding a yellow dab to the shirt's pale blue.

Old age should burn and rave at close of day

and the period between youth and middle age yawns, and ponders the wisdom of a cup of tea, at forty minutes before sunset on a Sunday evening in late April.

Prediction

I think I know who'll be throwing out the first pitch at Fenway today. The Red Sox higher-ups are keeping it a secret, and will say only "it'll give you goosebumps." I think I've got it figured out.

She's seven years old.

Will update you if my prediction is accurate or not.

Update, Wednesday: I was wrong. See comment box.

Welcome!

According to the newly installed ClustrMap, this blog has recently had visitors from Brazil, Japan, and Belgium (or was that northern France?). Canada, Hawaii, wherever you're from ... welcome!

Discovered

An online selection of Emily Dickinson's poems.

To all souls that love God, to all true Christians, there shall come a first month of the year, as the month of April, a day of resurrection.

from the Homilies of St Macarius

And now for something completely different ...

Amazing Grace, 2007. By a new artist!

Joss Stone
née Joscelyn Eve Stoker

"Son of a Preacher Man," 2006:



The dress is a little too short.

Dusty Springfield
née Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien

"Son of a Preacher Man," 1968:

One year

Today marks the anniversary of my return to "regular" blogging! That is, if 5-10 posts a week can be called "regular" when compared to the 50+ posts per week of five years ago.

Well, here's the post that (re)started it all, one of my favorite passages from the Book of Wisdom.

Realism, modified

On the night after Patrick met Patrick, to joust with their gladsome épées, Felix awoke (and rushed toward the coffee-pot, because his body believed the sunrise to be imminent) at 3:04 am.

O fortunate Felix, who can re-read Caelica as the sparrows sleep and the airplanes murmur sweet nothings! O happy city, in which haikus are crowed at the drop of dawn!

Secret enclave : wistful.

Corners of porches. Corners of libraries.

Ensconced in yesterday. Sheltered from sun.

Poignancy and trees. Sky shuttered out.

Storage of memories. Old houses best.

Jamaica Plain backyard. Fences and neighbors.

Autumn all year. Even in April.

Temperature

Crickets chirp in Celsius,
sparrows Fahrenheit.

News items

Bulletin : Pencil-sharpeners are hungry for what is blunt.

Bulletin : Possible Downtown Crossing explorations & the scampering ram.

Bulletin : Time to get the Scrabble partner's watch fixed.

Bulletin : Importance is vital. Write that down.

Bulletin : Seasons are changing. Blossomings burgeon. Trees get an A-plus in creativity. Too rambunctious for the A in conduct.

Bulletin : Teachers don't teach trees how to grow and rejoice. Unless they're poets & do so in November.

Bulletin : Martin's daughter-in-law still shines like any star, at the age of twoscore something.

Bulletin : Blind gondoliers travel canals that are (what else?) Venetian!

Bulletin : Pack-rats indulge in schemes to resurrect literature.

And today's weather : A chance of audacity, hampered by clouds, assisted by them rather.

Surrealism

There are two ways of having a cup of tea. Carefully and cautiously. Paying heed to the steep prices, and the bleeding bag of leaves.

A cup of tea is a simile. So went the meanings. Here we abrade with the sound of abrupt.

When we write a villanelle, it is in the realm of such. Of such and of suchlike. The governor is swift and Wyoming is compared to the Pyrenees.

Innocent can mean unwedded. Les noces parfaites. Have we glanced at the etymologies for "hectic" and "fettle." Have we collaborated with our choice rejoicer.

Scripture and Holy Tradition [...] give us no grounds for supposing that, through a steady advance in "civilization", the world will grow gradually better and better until mankind succeeds in establishing God's kingdom on earth. The Christian view of world history is entirely opposed to this kind of evolutionary optimism.

Bishop Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way, p. 134

Jussive

The rive-gauche mafia's jussive cries
for help and collegiality
thunder faintly down profligate corridors
of panache and decentralization.

Whose palazzo is it anyway?
We are chirpy, chirpier, chirpiest
choristers addicted to life.
We are known as a place of welcome,
so stay away
if you're not one of us.

Where are the lispers and traipsers of yesteryear? Or yesternight
    even?
Huddled in a bunker, knocking back the bubbly?
Such froth! Such frippery! Oh, you ...

you rascal,
with your lissome repartee
and your bodacious "fear of same."

2003

Five poems

Wine, guitars, blue bulls, red sun,
outmoded whispers --

*

The haiku of blue
by Kobayashi-Rimbaud
shines like jolie lune ...

*

Ashberyana:
traceries of yestermorn,
forgeries of night

*

Hoosegow bumpkin strums
on mauve mandolin

*

Weighing grey, rehearsing sound,
eccola! Spring rain
drops like light

2003

Realism, modified

The stone is dreaming of Vienna. Bowie plays Doha.

If all else fails

Write about all the proper themes
Write about bridge-builders and icon-makers
Write about massacres and resolute measures
Write about popular music and cultureslaves
Write about the Book of Common Prayer
Write about the grousings of overpaid first-basemen
Write about formality and decorum
Write about sartorial splendor
Write about religion and discount prophecy
Write about the whited sepulchres
Write about September 16th on Hampden Street
Write about ethics in journalism
Write about the President of the United States
Write about the burning issues of the day

Write about all the wrong things
Write about Silver Lake New Hampshire
Write about the death of American poetry
Write about nihilism and prenatal infanticide
Write about the sparrows 30 minutes before sunrise
Write about Hildegarde of Bingen
Write about an appointment at 2:45 pm
Write about the drunk who met His Eminence
Write about women who make the city heaven
Write about Westminster and Windmill Hill
Write about the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Write about sinners and dense theologians
Write about the mysteries of life
Write about taboos and kinks and addictions

Write about things you don't know about
Write about people and places you haven't met or seen
Write about mediocrities and blithe spirits
Write about the second cup of coffee
Write about Dutch waitresses who pretend to be Irish
Write about serious things like Hollywood marriages
Write about the contemporary scene with detached irony
Write about the French because somebody has to
Write about Saint Monica who prayed for her son
Write about cappuccino at the Kendall Square Cinema
Write about dashed hopes and broken promises
Write about red leaves in late August
Write about variety being the spice of life
Write about a sturdy hammock in suburban shade

And if all else fails be silent
Because silence never makes mistakes

1997

Emily Dickinson
from a letter

The Sailor cannot see the North --
but knows the Needle can --

poem

about the retreat to the Trappist abbey sixteen years ago ...

Commonwealth Avenue Mall

Sparrow, fierce extortionist!
I have no more crumbs.

2003

To a Trappist

Oh, to be he, with snakes in the jakes!
Cistercian Merton, in his hermitage of icons,
in his dream-den where Proverb sings a secret ageless wisdom,
yes, the monk of hopeful phone-calls to hospitals of love.
Cistercian Merton, left of center, marginal in the rusted trailer,
patron of my fringe existence, pray for me
with your edifying cables, your sensational times,
your blind-lion tears between loblolly pines,
your vanishing trails to the stone Buddhas of unforeseen heaven,
your vow of silent conversation, prosing haiku pictures
of the cloistered farm, of nature's wreckage,
of the ramshackle glory of things as they are,
your coffee on cold mornings, your dexterous calligraphies,
your ephemeral Zen monuments of anguish and joy,
your sinful-saintly standing watch as the world does its work,
your searing psalmody, your soaring liturgies, your telling beads of
      heartbreak,
your sighs to the hills and frosted nightstars
of a distant immortal Kentucky.

2003

call it what you will

1

leaf-life blighted by the smoke
from a passing bus

2

treble tolls of bleak dismay
drab rodomontade

3

the morning of the poem
jazzy drops of rain

4

and the dulcet bumblebees
murmuring their gripes

5

lemon-scented buttercups
lisp their odes to spring

6

canopied boulangeries
rambunctious churches

2003

Surrealism

The ecumenical python lunged at the scrumptious daisy, causing paroxysms of havoc, maniacal fits of glee, in the community of Anglo-Catholic tumbleweeds.

Here endeth the lesson.

16 years ago this week

I was making a retreat at a Trappist monastery. The monks were very kind. A cherished memory.

Poem

I have tried to hold you in my heart; 
You will not accept this grasp and clutch.
(Days turn into years: shall I forget
Her whose face and voice I loved so much?)
Splendid, gentle, proud, defiant one,
Dwell within me like an inner sun:
Warm the places lacking love and light.

Speak to me of peace, O sainted soul:
Mercy must be born again in me.
Come, beloved, teach a prattling fool
Ways of hope and faith and charity.
Smile upon my sorrow; banish fear;
Cleanse me from the sins of yesteryear:
Live within my life and make me whole.


1999

Cummings

if everything happens that can't be done
(and anything's righter
than books
could plan)
the stupidest teacher will almost guess
(with a run
skip
around we go yes)
there's nothing as something as one

one hasn't a why or because or although
(and buds know better
than books
don't grow)
one's anything old being everything new
(with a what
which
around we come who)
one's everyanything so

so world is a leaf so a tree is a bough
(and birds sing sweeter
than books
tell how)
so here is away and so your is a my
(with a down
up
around again fly)
forever was never till now

now i love you and you love me
(and books are shuter
than books
can be)
and deep in the high that does nothing but fall
(with a shout
each
around we go all)
there's somebody calling who's we

we're anything brighter than even the sun
(we're everything greater
than books
might mean)
we're everyanything more than believe
(with a spin
leap
alive we're alive)
we're wonderful one times one