January 31, 2009

Romans 9

Dirt, ribs, and breath;
life rises with you.
Descendants with wind cracked skin,

barren as a charred pot,
burning between heifers, goats, and
rams. Got caught in the thistles,

yet as struggle became your name
the invisible hand rose between
death and life, slave and free.

The drops of the sacrificial lamb
are dark pockets in Egyptian sand,
hot on your bare feet as you ran

between the reeds; dried, caked
and unleavened dust on your raw heels.
But bronzed chariots, a thousand harlots,

and the amusement of wealth lay in languid wait.
On your backs, sang songs of palms and fawns
then rolled over to another love.

Unspoken of, insidious, dark walls tall
like an exotic women with intimidating eyes.
Bowing low, weeping at riversides

with the blades wide between harps
and joyful plucking hands.
Amends, amends and hope flows

like the Jordan and you came up glistening
in the baptismal bliss of repentance.
What you will still miss despite knowledge,

light, Moses and Elijah, outwardly contrite
but, as iron holds, you are convinced of
your own right, convinced you own the way;

instead it hangs between heaven and earth;
even the sky must look away.

January 29, 2009

Job 9-10

One dollar Chuck's, muddied and salted,
escape a network disintegration,
an insignificant download,
my gradebook's confusion and erasure.

Depression in a purple hoodie,
pink splattered up the side and
hair swept over one eye, he dares
not see the world as whole for then

he may be demanded to live in it.
The wind hits the four corners of my
white walls, dulled by blank stares,
apathy destroys some, devours most.

Crowbars of ice cracked my favorite tree,
the brilliant yellow i never see
in the Indiana winter, and constrained
to the older hallway with knotted beams

overhead of the daily abuse of the minutia;
the gnats in my coffee, the furnaces to reset,
the daily laughs i routinely trade for headaches,
the boring light of computer screens.

All around me speaks Almighty, for i have
no control of winter storms and students born
nor the mysteries of work's tyranny.
Everything is spiritual, but today i see

everything is not good?

January 26, 2009

Matthew 8

Atrophy and decades
of decaying springs compressing
constitute a difficulty in movement
for forcibly anorexic bones.
But a father is laying on me,
so with lanky clacks of
ligamentless joints I dig up.

I've been here beneath
man-pulled wagons (like the one
that dumped me over wooden sides),
beneath tar and pitch cabins,
legends of dragons and battlegrounds,
beneath hooves of cows and back lawns
and white fences, folding chairs and
yawning women under radiant sun.

And I've never been aroused for
the duties of digging another,

there has always been son or brother
to deal with death. I mean,
dying leaves dry on the trees, forest floor
or underneath. Why the urgency?

The living long to bury quickly
before a fever of memory, before
tears on stately black lapels
have evaporated into grieving.

So what has seized the breathing man
with morbid fervor and unity
of purpose and movement, that lightly
he turned back on lifeless father,
decomposing into my likeness,
and left him here upon my plot,
his resting place undug?

Perhaps, no, has he found life
and left the death to God and to me?

January 21, 2009

Psalms 8

"You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet..."

Classic espresso shoes with a light
crunchy layer of snow, and a salt line
fading into the backs of my jeans,

more than fifty degrees below
the temperature of freezing, and i feel
this cold creation seep into me

through the pores of my school shoes.
But i exercise control, the multicolored
welcome mat and the monotone shovel

help me stomp and swipe; clean, clear
and dry and enter my humanity.
When i exit again, i will try

to retrace the footprints of others
or steps i've already made
through the flattened white landscape,

For when inconvenient created life clings
to pant legs, arm hairs, sweats or shoes,
i brush it down and stomp it under my feet.

January 19, 2009

Genesis 9

Jolted by the choking bus,
faces and fumes smolder
and stagnate, Spanish warnings
splashed above unreachable rails;
i stand amidst it, my face in
the armpit of your rainbow tee shirt.

Sweating into Turrialba, its ruins,
motels, cockroaches, and creaking beds.
Over volcanic craters a conversation,
over the offer of a taxi-ride from
Humberto, over the fear we had when
he stopped in front of the house and
the wheelchaired man smiled and waved.

In the Costa Rican mountaintops,
amidst smoldering lava and nature's warnings,
an old covenant comforts us above
a whistling waterfall. The forest floor
lined with leaf-cutter ants busying themselves
without worry of providential destruction,

for colors streak through the ashen sky,
though you had tried to steal them,
though your every thought be perverted,
never again will columns of anvil cloud envelop
the whole of earth. Still, as we march through
Mayan wastelands, i beg you to not twist symbol,
to not manipulate mercy and grace

to prove that they don't exist.

January 13, 2009

Joshua 6-10

Disquiet in the mortar,
shofar shakes limitless brick,
the calm of the City of Palms.

The calm of the nation of priests,
spiders in the desert sands,
spread thin and blown hard by
faithful winds of reverence.

Eventually the pride in mudbrick
will falter, and violence will fall
on the heads of all without a rouge rope.
What political savvy and dreadful
practicality, as the death cries

of children ring in my ears. Sinful
mothers without thought of the Only
watch one-year olds mumbling "bye-bye"
tossed aside for the purity

of these, the Lord's priests.
In this brutal march, i do not speak of
metaphor, but demand to see mercy.

January 11, 2009

Matthew 3

Fireworks subsiding,
fluorescent basement bulbs
break the dawn.
My limbs and twigs arc
in brilliant white streaks
toward the violet Berber
that my own hands laid.
Thoughtful branches laden
with pomegranates and figs,
wheat and grain pastries and
a cold cup of leftover grapes.
In the winter season, in the newness,
promise and purpose warm the vines
and all that stirs my wakening
seems ripe to prune and type.
Strange that as spring clutters
with rain, mud, and end of the year
boxes of leftover grades
i will wither quicker.
i am no tamarix, green throughout
all seasons, but with no fruit.
My sticks produce in cycles,
fruit in keeping with confession, but so dry
when the world around explodes with life.

January 8, 2009

Job 4

Blue card stock and bold Garamond,
elementary words for elementary rules,
in the high whisper of puberty
italicized secrets of incredulity.

Stretched out on hidden cove carpet tiles,
with Mead's wide ruled stuck into texts;
his brother juggled torches the night before
they shipped him off to Iraq.

Anesthesia dried her sister's lips, they turned
as milk and water in nausea, like her
second degree burn, when her father tore
off the coffee soaked cotton sweats

but the melted skin was shred off as well.
Each one must tell, their unfortunate gospels,
the time in black Sharpie on back of the hand,
and the sweat smeared name on the palm.

Surely, my sarcasm, now underwritten, with
overblown activity. How can we keep from speaking?

January 6, 2009

Joshua 4 & James 2

Dusty aisles part discarded heaps,
canned green beans and boxed Hormel
chili; we twelve cross the stairwell
and formulate efficient means, the tide keeps

piling up behind our pacing backs.
Elementary boys busy themselves eagerly
paring rust circles, so recklessly
desiring to paint the water from the cracks.

Tell them to pick the paint cans
from the floor of this Jordan, construct and stack.
Splashed gray from the pouring; simple tabernacle
shrine for our simple remembrance.

Carry with me dank and dusky memories:
basements where our hands joined divine,
cleared the freezers, reordered by wine
and bread, where faith stands dead without activity.

January 1, 2009

Positioned for complete sacrifice,
prepared for a gritty recrudescing
in my natural dust, but first;
i do need to know if i know You.
It is essential, like my friends,
beer snobs, who drink
Eliot Ness and Edmund Fitzgerald,
they knowingly distance their names
from anything less.
My concern is less with alcohol,
(despite them i barely drink at all),
but with creation, with art, with imagination.
Be not daft and simple for me,
but give me knowledge; to what will You
ascribe Your name? How will You announce
Your presence, make Your nature known?
i see You speak the world alive in poem.
Bringing rhythm and meter to spaces unbound,
cherishing language, You bring forth
ground and water, punctuate darkness and light,
and with nothing less, with holy words.
As I hear the black breaking, i know,
we have a lot more knowing to do.