Teeter-totter
teetering, tottering
always toward the
slightly weighted edge.
Constant attention
to the correction,
teasing out the
resistant middle,
and Moses’ arms
grow brittle
over the fickle
battlefield of
give and take
rest and run
break and mend
this and that
more and less
press, release
war and peace
again, again.
“When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?”
I am the small ball
juggler careening
atop the beach ball
in the pool.
And now that
I have fallen again
and shown myself
the charlatan
glum in wet
clinging clothes,
I have no will,
heaven knows,
to chase after flotsam.
-----------
Whittle me with wind,
with rain that planes
flat the grooves
and cuts
the neck away
until I am
what I have so long
sought to become:
an impossibility!
A held-together
defying whether
it’s either-or.
Anomaly in
the world of precise
manufacturing
and more economy.
Carve into me
angles more alarming
than the circus
contortionist,
out of proportion
to the grade
of today’s
immaculate mode!
May Aaron
and Hur hold
each other in
fierce orbit,
each listing
over the ledge
with the recklessness
of falling
were it not for
the mass of the other:
Love rescuing each minute
My Truth
even as Truth fills
My Love with
such weight as
will crush
the shadow it casts
beneath its perilous lean
if ever it should break
and fall so far.
I have conceived of a longer work that features various rock formations inside Arches National Monument in Moab, Utah, and uses each rock formation as a catalyst for musing on the nature of becoming. This is the first draft of the first poem in the project. In Balanced Rock I am wrestling with the idea that attempting to achieve balance in life through the effort and discipline of "finding the resistant middle" and holding it in place will only create fatigue and eventual failure. In contrast to that "manufacturing" approach, I instead in the poem pray for a miracle of transformation, effected externally by divine power, which creates in me "balance" by a radical inclusion and embrace of the edges (Truth and Love, Aaron and Hur) over against a compromise of having just the right amount of each. Healthy life-balance turns out not so much a heroic act of careful juggling, but a faith-jump into the messy mix of the way different values shape one another when they are fully present and allowed to play. The italicized quote in the middle of the poem is taken from Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem Peace.
Photo credit: Pixabay.com: CCO Public Domain.