Tag Archives: reality

Faith and style

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Overheard: “Religion is fashionable these days.”

I’m going Hassidic, man,
Black hat, long curls
Slip-sliding down my ears,
Prayer thing, all fringy,
Hanging out my waistcoat

Or maybe Mormon,
White shirt, black tie
In the high summer heat
Bike oil staining my cuffs

If that don’t work,
I might go Amish
Dress like I just busted
A long term sentence
Begun in 1850,
Drag my plow horse to work
Every God-given day

Or Catholic?
They got nothing except
For priests, and I’m no priest
Got no taste for boys
Got up in cassocks

Nor desert stuff for me
Got no taste for heads
Wrapped or unwrapped
Attached or unattached

I’d consider voodoo
But my juju
Is lame and those
Blazing beads radiate
Way too much heat

Or, on second thought, no.
I got no style for this kind of stuff

We live, not moment to moment

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We live, not moment to moment,
but in a single eternal moment,
soft and unyielding, like splinters
of destiny,

songs in the heart of the universe,
unheard, unhummed,
but by the small almost still
vibration of unseeable things,

now real, now gone,
now magnified to deathless
breathlessness, beyond, finally,
all knowing.

One day, we’ll fly there on
wings of dying, spread ourselves
across the native sky
like phantom snow.

Music

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We spend our lives
trying to mute the noise
unaware that it’s
the very music of the cosmos
we’re so desperate to hear

The hammer of your eyes

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The hammer of your eyes
Shapes everything you see
Until reality collapses
From the weight of persistence

The thingness of things is such
That it mutates to meet expectation,
Owes allegiance to the naming ritual
Rolls from the tongue with lilting guile
And slips from the grasp as easily
As money or grace

These things carry meaning:
Sky, sea, mountain and plain
Whose rivers tie the bounds
Of Earth together

These things rip meaning from the heart:
Ash, coal, and smoke,
Zippered into a theory of sky
Beyond the bezelled horizon.

We ignore destiny,
Hoping to write our own stories,
Like Oedipus, like God,
Unaware that fate has no will
But is bound by the sacred law
Of irony.

Dustup

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We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.  ~ W. B. Yeats

This mirror is no help at all,
such a sludge of regret.

I used to think I was either divine
or pointless, cringed at the
occasional glimpse of ordinary,
that hint of sameness
lurking in the corner of my reflection.

This, God’s apple, was punishment enough
for the transgression of being.