A Little Christmas

Gather us into one city, roar

and set us flying, from Cairo,

Erbil, London, Prague. A city

of many peoples and one God:

                   and a little child leading.

                                 Lord of the snows and the quiet country 

                                 under frost, we see you rise to tread the

                                 heights of earth. Lord of the snows and

                                              the churning cities, we listen for your 

                                              voice. Infant lion, give forth voice

                                              to bid us come, gathered in one city.

                                 Lord of the snows and the summer heat,

                                 Lord of all great cities, roar and bring us

                                 trembling to the holy hill, where your glory is.

                                              

Rosh ha-Carmel

Tending to the vine in the vineyard—

in God’s own vineyard, the vine—

with slow care, husbandry, skill,

in readiness for the day you fear:

the fire, the bullet, the knife and the bomb;

exhaustion of the body, the hollow in

the belly; fear of insanity, of aneurysm,

dementia, the brain; fear of forgetting

your purposes, and the uses of love.

O Lord, you know well that I

want only to do some work

that will be useful to you, some

pleasing occupation, not shrinking

from labor and want, but eager

to take up plowshare, sickle, shovel, rake:
O Lord, let there be such a thing for me.

Sweeney Defiant

Amid the tables and the chatter of guests

falls a comfortable hush, and deep-despised

Sweeney stands with a glass of stout,

and the oracles

and judgments of his god—lifting glass,

composes self (a crooked smile,

sneering voice), coughs once, begins attack:

                        Boston Brahmin,

                        dressed in black,

                        the nat’ral aristocracy,

                        inherits merit

                        from ancestral bone

                        and transplanted virtue

                        in the earth.

                        Past midnight,

                        with his mistress,

                        professes love:

                        Sounding notes upon your fingers,

                        it is impossible

                        that this body should die, I

                        love you like fire from my atom heart.

                        Impossible to die, yet Beatrice was not

                        beloved for body (Oho! says Sweeney,

                        shining, think’st me unschooled? No, but

                        I have seen your secrets, tender secrets,

                        and I have weighed them slight), and how

                        then shall I love you so while you yet live?

                        How shall a love like ours not flee the

                        fearful summons, the rising light?

                        Adieu, adieu, adieu, je t’aime.

                        So, saith Sweeny, our Brahmin goes

                        out in shadow, fearing like a guilty thing

                        to be taken by the dawn rising on

                        th’Everlasting Day.

                                                          To courtly love!,

Sweeney says, drains his foaming glass.

He sits, in time the moment’s past.

The joke finds no approval in his companions’ eyes,
but Sweeney sits smiling, by many there deeply despised.

Echter Herbst

Northbound through Jersey where the rumble strips

glitter in the evening gloom, I heard Nina

sing apocalyptic. The petrol smell of artifice,

centrifuge Manhattan pulls creation like electron

spin. The inspiration of the semi-truck spirit (keinen

Friede, sondern ein Schwert)—

Bring down power, Lord,

power

Power, Lord,

bring down—

Your high-built walls were too few to keep out

the fox-eyed Christ. Had you not heard?

The kingdom is like a mustard seed.

I watched the long, slow spiral of

martyred leaves glide down over fences

and furrow lines. Like a chastened thing,

I took my rest in shade, matching
minor keys to harvest months.

Meditation after Christian Wiman

Ecstasy—technically—has nothing

to do with the widesmiling,

handclapping feeling of youth.

Ecstasy, technically, is

(to put it gently)

what ancient Sarah felt

delivering a son,

joy tearing at the seams

of you, blessing that

unravels you,

presses,

stretching the flesh of you,

issuing in laughter

if only because the terror
has not come instead.

Nachtmusik for Robert Lowell

Writing only in preacher-words,

we who are the opposite

of beauty level guns at the

fractured, scattered sky.

The hunt is desperation—

I feel the throaty bile

in my soul. All or nothing

now, broke-leg, broke-jawed,

soon to die for want of

whatever makes for the

champagne life, where whiskey

bright as wine turns

the eyes all liquor-lucent,

full of God. The poet

of my own country spoke of

casting worm and hook

for Christ; let that stand,

and yet I will go hunting heaven,
and the Word will strike me dead.

Alles Erdreich Ist Österreich Untertan

They called him Charles the Hexed (hechizado,

verhexte), Carlos the Ill-jawed, the sickle-

souled, the king born from tired soil.

He looked for all the world like a wax man
melting on a throne, a changeling of poor

fortune, the royal imbecile in Spain.

            Charles the Penumbra, the tremble 

            of that long shadow cast by

            the grasping hand, a sick and

            waning moon in a solar house.

           

            AEIOU come down to this, down

            to the drooping point of his

            witchcraft chin. Worse, Percy,

            than what your pious mind

            conceived—say this for him,

            our curse-marked Charlie, that

            he was Ozymandias in ruined flesh,

            the ragged edge where we learn

            that we have sinned.

Austria is so very small compared

with the hallowed earth, and

Charles ended in the way
that small things do.

Valley Green (Fragments)

Walking out in the storm’s tattoo

I saw in the night

Fitzgibbon, smoking by the

laundromat. The cloud he said

was sick and sweet as

burning sugar on

the altar in the house.

                        Let the city be a harpsichord

                       

                        Toccata and fugue

                        in Philadelphia, where

                        I went on like a left-eyed

                        stranger with a sidelong

                        ticking in the brain—whir

                        and wobble, catch and shudder.

Across the street in the late-emptied church,

look, Schwarzwalder at the pulpit,

speaking of the desert, of Horeb

where they studied God in fire

(A God as yet unbodied

A world not yet domestic)

“Comfort were no comfort

now, so I am come with fire

for the wound.”

Once more to home,

and see, here’s St-Etienne

in seat, book in mouth
(“It tastes so bitter—

very bitter, unless perhaps

it’s sweet”) and the

jackhammer heel playing paradiddle

on the floor.

Here is Tolstoy in his dotage,

pilgrim from the long-toothed

city, the sun-beat city, the

city in the air.

                        With these riot eyes

                       

to dazzle and deceive,

in you, by you, I

will get fire—I

will beget fire till

the soil of my soul runs thin.

The Frontier Sermon

The circuit-riding preacher

Came to town on back of

A black horse (“I call him

Evangelion, having shod him

With the Gospel”) and, stepping

Down, he called out for water.

He drank and washed and

Shook his golden head. “I

Come to you, Word of God in

Hand and six-gun on my

Belt, ready to declare to you

All the counsel of God

On high, and the mystery

Of his Son. Gather, children,

Sons and daughters, of God

And of the Devil, and hear that

Heavenly Word. Look around,

Look around, at this broad

And fearsome West, fashioned

By God against all wisdom

Not crucified with Christ.”

And again he paused, and again

He called, for whiskey and

Some bread, and blessed them

In Dakota’s dawn. When

He had drunk and ate, he

Opened up his book, he
Cleared his throat, and preached.

A Prayerbook

Listen for the divided word

in the city where

the policeman said

it was his gun against

the thunder, and two

guns against the storm.

An article of faith:

all who build

cities would build

Jerusalem.

            When you sing, you

            sing the summer,

            and you are always

            singing—

                             as for me,

            ursus rusticanus, I

            have December in

            my teeth,

            will show you why

            I stare this way,

            why the thick-tongued

            mutters, why—

All my bones repent,

and the Kyrie of

all my bones goes

reeling on the wind

When we breathe, we breathe confession.

I recall reading somewhere that

breath is a slow fire

in the body, much like

the name of God.

There is a fine epitaph,

and fine enough for me.

The Hunting Night

The word of your mouth
is a tearing knife;
the word of the Lord
is a severing knife:

O Lord, carve me up.
Walking barefoot

on the broken bodies of apostles

Lord,
tear me to pieces.

It is not without reason
that the prophet
saw in Assyria, and in the land
of Egypt, his God fanged and roaring, lionlike.

Fatuus Profanus

You are dusty vinyl to my soul

I see your image
in a factory Matisse
that hangs over me

like a promised judgment,
a voice emphatic
to remind

the shaggy-bear
                          the
                                lumber-lurcher

          the trip-and-stagger
making clumsy groans
upon the earth

                              You leave me only
                              the broken voice of
                              self-reproach, having
                              learned to speak
                              obscurely but not well.

The Whiskey Priest

I thought of saying,

Look, I will take you through my self,

show you where the laceration is,

where I have been bruised. Come,

come and marvel, be taken

with my pain.

But I have changed, and

the change perhaps is wisdom.

All hearts are wounded, only

not everyone complains.

Instead of asking you to

be smitten by the scars,

I would rather go with you

to look at sunlight on the swell,

or birds flying in the city,

seeming each to be turned

and pointed by

the patient touch of God.

A Birthright, A Memory

Pilgrim

Beneath a southern sky I

despaired to find that I was

ugly. But a man is not a

stone, however stony he becomes,

so coming to this altar at the

heart of things, carving signs

of hope and warding on me,

I call: Mercy, mercy, only mercy.

                                            Priest, Prophet

                                                           

                                            We have builded you this altar

                                            (Gefühl ist nicht alles) in chalk and

                                            spittle (Yehuda ya’aleh) Is this

                                            not pleasing? (Yes, and even

                                            less than this—I cast you out

                                            I burn and blast you) And yet:

                                            There is a kind of violence in

                                            your soul (Und wer ist da?)

Pilgrim

A snarl in the bone-knit frame, so

full that I could drown therein,

full to death—Yes, yes, for having

mistaken the ache in my belly for

a righteous groan, nevertheless I

come. In the plains, in the prairies,

we hunted the beast over trackless

spaces; we pierced it and it groaned

away its life. Am I guilty for it,

or have I borne offense? Say.

                                         Priest, Prophet

                                         Not for this, not for this, understand

                                         (And yet for this also, O Macbeth of the

                                         middle managers) Some other sin is

                                         graven in you (Like some cloud of

                                         Twombly’s, like a sick brain decaying

                                         from garish roots of paint, oh!)

Pilgrim

Then could you mean—?

                                           Priest, Prophet

                                           Yes, I mean (Stop this pretense, 

                                           speak plain)

Pilgrim

They say baptism is itself a burial;

therefore the dead will surely rise. So

let it be, daughter of Chicago, let

it run like blood in living veins.

But oh, but oh she drowned at

the lake while in the house in

quiet rooms men spoke to

women, alone, and softly.

That blessed lady died, and

where, then, was I?

                                 Priest, Prophet

                                 With her and not (Living and not) For which

                                  reason you are come (For here alone is the

                                  high-flung rock, here alone is succor,

                                  here only the anointed earth) Kiss the earth

                                  and bless it (For the judge of all the earth will

                                  not do wrongly) So sagen er und wir

Pilgrim

Kiss the earth and bless it—?

So, I have, and do. And let this

earth bring forth in honor

what was sowed, life without

ceasing, and world without end.

                                          Priest, Prophet

                                          Hallelu-Jah (And the word of his mouth)

                                          For all in all is submerged but

                                          rising (Arisen and yet drowned)

                 All 

                Hallelu-Jah,

                And the word of his mouth

                                    

Lepus Superaggerus

The old novelist who

lived down the street,

he played golf and

smoked and read books

by Chesterton and Barth,

and, like straw, he spun

words into words, and

then one day he died.

And now in the little

bookshop down the hill

there is a shelf that

lifts and carries only

words that he wrote

while drinking whiskey
in these woods by the beach.

One Hallowed Eye Which

One hallowed eye which
Whirling
Sees the world
Kaleidoscopic

One whirling eye
Prophetic
Seeing all that is
Momentous on the earth
And behind the earth
In wheels of fire and
In lucent eddies
A sunlit cataract

And a ragged-breathing
Mouth that
Catches
Rudely at the air
Desperate to be filled
With something not its own

This is the glory of mankind
This the LORD's own blessing

Darling Girl

I wish that I could say I

loved some little strangeness in

your face, a quirk of a mole,

some ghostly scar across your

cheek, a way you have of

smiling. But I am not the charming

hero of a charming film, and

I was not drawn to a small

thing about you—though of course

you were lovely in your darkness

and warmth, and the curl of

your hair and your enamel-bright

eyes and the weight of you

when you happened to find some

reason to be pressed against me—

I was bound to you entire. Your

wit and your happy cruelty, your

earnest irony in the service of

greater things. 

All I wanted was

you, whole and fiery,

but not all wants are better fed.