Full Court Press

          Antonin Scalia

         found dead in

         his bed.

 

          Conspiracy theories

          run rampant.

          Instead

 

          of the blindfold,

          dogma

          prevails.

 

          Loaded dice

          are the antonym

          of scales.

 

Last week's unexpected death of conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia during an election year has all the ingredients of a John Grisham novel!  Expect dispassionate jurisprudence to take a back seat to hyper ideological posturing in the days ahead.

       

Dust Wednesday

                               We are but ashes and shall return to dust

                                              --from a prayer in the Roman Catholic Ash Wednesday Mass


For we are dust,

formed from ground,

and to dust

we are returning.


Adam’s noble

call, a crown

to reign over

terra crust,


now is dust

raining down

upon his head

like ashes thrown


overboard in

headwind or

from a window poured

toward roadside  trees.


Branches low

with withered fruit

cleave into

wild-grass beds


in midday heat.

Pile-gathered,

feeding  fire,

flames unravelling


threads that once

knit root to leaf,

all now curling

charred wisps of


acrid smoke over

whimper and gnash

as the liturgy turns

the dust to ash.   

I am intrigued by the relationship of dust and ash.  In the story of Adam's creation dust is the benign (but lifeless) ground from which God shapes him and consequently breathes life into him (Genesis 2:7). It strikes me that at its worst dust is a very neutral term, and at its best a positive reality. But after Adam's fall the curse language predicts Adam's return to dust, now carrying clear negative connotations of emptiness and disintegration.  In this latter sense dust becomes appropriately analogous to ash.  Interestingly the word ash never shows up in the curse language of Genesis 3.  We do, however,  see it associated with dust (in its negative sense) a couple of times in the Old Testament (see Genesis 18:27; Job 30:19; 42:6), and the common use of dust in the Old Testament will often carry the overtones of lifelessness and vanity.  Dust and ash have been poetically, and I think correctly, linked in the traditional burial language of the Church ("ashes to ashes, dust to dust") and in the liturgies of Ash Wednesday.  Ash, in my estimation, better crystallizes the tragic dimensions of humankind's post-fall estate.

My Love, You Are

spring wind

sprung lively

and quick.

 

All your world

turns dance.

Thick branches

shyly bobble.

 

Fallen leaves

on decay’s brink

leap to life at

your swing by.

 

And I, enchanted,

raise my hands

with spread fingers

to comb you,

 

swim you, seek

home in you,

hold you, and let you go

without ever

 

having owned you.  

 


Old Letter Yellowing

Is it possible that

this old envelope which

bears a cryptogram once

sealed inside of it has

since been taken as the

secret epigram itself?

 

Have I settled for these

lines of name and place de-

void  of narrative to

be the storyline that

so will play the plot of

my eventual destiny?

 

Do I dare to tear this

edge and break the code with a

cipher from outside to

find that I am in a

hero’s role fearlessly falling

toward the most unimaginable

 

beauty that could ever be

the beautiful?

 

This little poem is about settling early, something we all tend to do, stopping before arriving at the truth of things, where, if we would have only kept at it, we would have found the thing we were really looking for all along. It reminds me of one of Jesus' favorite phrases: "for the one who has ears to hear."

 

Four Memos to J. Morton Allen

Memo One

To: J. Morton Allen

Re: Mission

_______

 

Plant a seed deep inside the boy

that words matter, words can remake

a world formed from nothing

in six days by

Word.

In time he will

find his place among

his heroes, adding to their long

harvest his own variety of joy.

 

Memo Two

To: J. Morton Allen

Re: Method

_______

 

Adolescence is the spring time of deposit.

Hearing you, he will not hear you,

not for awhile until

after he has

suffered.

Budding wisdom

from its long cocoon

will emerge to sound the way a truth

can take on flesh, become the cause of it.

 

 

Memo Three

To: J. Morton Allen

Re: Plan

_______

 

Your time together will be short. Then he’ll

move away. No more contact.

The power of your gift will

release through

mystery.

The wafting scent

of a strong cologne

distilling in an empty room

haunts absence with a presence still.

  

 

Memo Four

To: J. Morton Allen

Re: Wings

_______

 

After this is over the bells will ring.

With the Dove at large and your

love in play, the line

of dominoes

falling,

next to next,

 truth and grace will climb

the Paraclete’s pathway toward

the gathering saints and angels with bright wings.

 

These four short poems are part of a larger collection entitled In Search of J. Morton Allen, a tribute to a fuzzy figure in my past who encouraged me in my identity as a young budding poet.  I was in seventh grade at the time. These short chiastic* poems are envisioned as God-memos to an angel named J. Morton Allen, briefing him  for a mission to go and encourage a young boy interested in poetry.

*The chiastic structure plays with inversion.  The two outer lines (1 and 9) in each memo ( both 5 stresses) correspond with each other through a meaning or verbal link, as do lines 2 and 8 (4  stresses each), lines 3 and 7 (3 stresses each), lines 4 and 6 (2 stresses each), with the middle line 5 (1 stress) holding the key word of the poem.  This term comes from the Greek chiasma which means "crossing," and is an official term of rhetoric referring to a figure of speech in which clauses relate to one another in an inverted parallelism.  Fun to experiment with!

 

New Year's Day

The bright sun belies the cold bite in the air,

same as yesterday, where the freeway traffic hums

 

north and south, streaming busy people about

their to-do lists. In everyone

 

blood insists again on leaping from its chamber

only to return there bored and spent. 

 

The lonely mall parking stall still longs

in vain for some connection longer lasting

 

than the last one went, while the arbitrary

calendar flips the end-of-December switch

 

as the ball falls.  And nothing clicks, neither on nor off.

I can still hear him coughing away in the bedroom,

 

watching the parade on TV as he has done

for eighty something New Year’s days,

 

eighty eager forays into promised land laden

with the tease of the long-awaited finally,

 

none of which he now remembers, sitting

on this new year precipice in a blank and kindly bliss—

 

absent hope with no regret, slipping into wet

January blind as the ticking watch loose around his wrist.

 

I find it a curious thing that we tend to see the turning of the year as an advent of something actually new, when in fact the transition from December 31 into January 1 is no different than the transition from December 30 into December 31.  Our assigning the magical quality of newness to the first hours of the new year is nothing but a mental game that fuels resolution making and emotional hope for change but in fact has no substantive reality to it, a realization that often hits home by January 15, when most resolutions have already come crashing to the ground. True change and true hope must be grounded in something more than wishful thinking rooted in arbitrary distinctions. Something like Christmas morning.

Of All Things You

It is true that trees

can strike in me a flash

of wonder, thin the plane

between other worlds,

awaken what is ripe

to yearn in me to yearn.

 

A course of clouds can crowd

the sky unearthing deep

deposits of iron awe,

raw in the hidden depths

of my every day world

that turns and make it turn.

 

The stream that sings along

its winding way beneath

the moss-dressed log and through

the alder grove can crack

the thick of creeping freeze

keeping my soul in keep.

 

But even these pale beside

(after long your absence)

that moment I first hear—

 like swift-pierce lightning spears

slicing through my senses—

to hear that you are here.