Indian Blankets

I walk among the Indian Blankets blooming bright on a spring day.
The day’s light it bears in an image from which I do not have to look away.
Fringed in yellow it turns to its father, and the holy face
Full of honor and obedience watches the sun’s trace.

The flower passes away in a summer and I know I have lost a brother
Yet in the earths loamy ground it waits to be exhumed by its father.
For each spring it is called to recount to me the deep truth of our race:
We are the other’s image to our Eternal Light which we cannot face.
We turn and see in each other His unbearable, beautiful Face.

A poem about the loss and renewal of the image

She is never too gone to write this wrong.
Somewhere she is freed from me strong
Enough to be another's immutable image,
A shared sight, but I no longer see its stage.

I was there with her once and always,
But here I am salted and sanded in this ground
Grinding my way into a buried haze.
Shroud of night, crowd of placeless thoughts
And spoke-less wheels, I feel this emptiness round
And through my shades of blurry, blaring sound.

Thy emptying leaves us dangling in dreaded ache and angst.

Tread in this night of ours and see the grey.
Creased with this fight, hours in a meaningless fray,
Leased plights, cried nights, being undone
From blackness and light, we are now none. 　

Into this blank world, speak us to life.
Whirled cup, wine and blood, leak rife
With sand that forms for us glass eyes,
New eyes that see through the crass sighs:
All are images that brew us into you.

She is Love's face shaped with a shy restraint.
Untie me from jealous eyes and chaste-less lies,
Uncensor me to feel the fragile, perfect sight
Of flesh's light in the bosom of a saint.

Explanation:

The idea for this poem came from Charles Williams' book The Image of Beatrice. Williams analyzes Dante's life work, mainly Dante's exposition of his romantic love for the Florentine woman Beatrice. Dante never married Beatrice nor did he ever consumate his love, instead he was rejected, Dante married another woman, and Beatrice died when she was 23. Yet this image of Beatrice remained for Dante so real that it in many ways called him to God as he depicts in the Divine Comedy. Beatrice is the theotokos (God bearer) to Dante. Beatrice and Dante's pure vision of romantic love for her are what bring Dante to God or God to Dante.

The poem is in two states, one the immediate, singular yet common feeling of refusal and departure of a love, the other a totally universal yet always singular feeling of abandonment. These two states in the poem are separated by the single line bewailing the emptying: The emptying of the image of the girl is paralleled with the emptying of the image of God in our sight. Often, when we see this world we see wrong in what was made as right and evil in that which was created as “good” by God. We cannot see with our coveting eyes the beauty of the world, instead we simply know it as things we do not miserly possess. We warp it with our lusts, and our lives are lived in the grey. We have nothing but our own barren struggles as we cannot see God in any of it because our eyes are shaded by our sinful hearts. In both the singular and universal experience, we dangle in the dreaded ache and angst of the departure of a love and the Love.

Then the poem moves to a call for renewal of the image, a prayer; more carefully said it calls for new eyes to see the images of God in the world. These images are everywhere, and while none of them are God, they all were made by God and bear Him forth in some way. Everything created and recreated in this world can be a means to call us to God and all have the possibility when seen with the right eyes to "brew us into you." The end is a retrieval of the singular experience of love and heart break in this new light. Even the romantic vision and the loss of it can call someone to God like it did Dante Alighieri so many years ago.

In the shadows and shades of Glory

When we see things face to face in this life, we often miss the beauty of what stands before us.  Too often we don't appreciate or love the object or being before us as much as we do the object in our peripheral vision. The oblique view often sharpens the single shades of things we didn't see as clear when we saw the object in its fullness.

When we tangentally see those we love from a place of loss, our hearts and minds delve deeper into their beauty. And as we see others, not so directly, maybe through the words of another, or in the light of another lense, we grow to respect, admire, and love them fuller.

This also is true with Christ. In the gospels we see Christ pass by those he means to call, longing for them to call after him, or he hides his true identity from us only to be known later by a kind of heart knowing, not the visual, mental, hard way of knowing. He does not always greet us face to face on the road, but instead walks by, catching our side gaze. We miss him as he passes, we know him for his passing, we see him better by our losing and we long for him fuller when we catch a hem of his garment as he scrapes by. He does not simply grab us and drag us down the road, he casts nets with his coyness and crescentness. He's revealed to us as a partial moon, a slimmer of glory. Not the full sun to our sodded eyes, but a window, an image that creeps solemnly by us and through us and around us. He is on all sides of us, but never in front, we see him pass in the grass, we feel him seep through when we try to grab handfulls of rain, and we know his voice only in the whispers of a fleeting wind.

 He is in all of this, but he is not any of it. Charles Williams constantly returns to this quote in his writings: "This also is Thou;  neither is this Thou." His revelation in creation is full of shapes, faces, and pieces that reflect and image his personality and power, but none of it is him.

His half-absence creates a truer longing, the half shades a deeper hunger. In this, he reveals his desire for our hearts, not just our minds.

God does not reveal himself fully to us in creation just as Christ did not trust himself to man in the gospels: He knows the heart of man and knows what is in it. We are selfish even when we know that our selfishness does not bring us happiness. We are dying paradoxes of self-loathing and self-love. God's desire for us is for our hearts to desire him, and instead of placing us in the fullness of his presence where we'd simply be forced to our knees in a mental capitulation with still recalcitrant hearts , he draws our hearts with shadows and shades of Glory.

As I breathe

Sometimes white isn't the purest color.

The dark spots on my shirt and the ink prints on my fingers as I left school on friday reminded me that I worked. I have a place to struggle.

Underneath a grey city bridge, the trash filled the lake with a rotten brown. My sister spoke words of life and joy while picking up the dank, dark, ruined things around us.

Dark faces and darker hair surrounds me as my spirit rises to a place I cannot speak of. I would, but I am not ready. Prepare me.

Open faces, spoken hearts, vulnerable admissions, and a reckless focus. Let today and tommorrow be enough- Lord- may my world not grow too big for my ability to love and may my love grow over and through all that I meet, face to face, life to life, here in the in between, in a spotted and speckled moment.

Rainfall on a Sunny Day

The grey light sheds misty drops on the motions of my weightless body. Falling drops tinge me with their bombardment and the sensuous smell of rain emanates a taste of life. The reigning clouds lift me out of the heavy weight of a Texas summer sun. The passing rain is not more than a breeze and a grey shadow, but swift, this business of life is acted and falls away and the life-filled grey above is parted.

There is a story about a blind man who when it rains can see the world by the pattering echoes of the rainfall. Its knocking on the sides of the world opens the eyes of his mind... Are we not blind souls unawake until we see and feel a knocking on the hard surfaces of the world? Is the poignant passing of pain and bitter tastes of life a rainfall into our world? Are true moments of sorrow and joy, the depths of human experience that mingle together in the heart of the universe, not the heavy beating of a life-giving rain?

I sit sedately in my comforted chair and would pass this world away, but a merciful God acts sorrow and joy into my heart with cauterizing nails to awaken me to the Cloud of His presence.

The thunder roams off in the distance admitting that it also is only a beggar at His feet.

You were a Miracle, why fear?

You were a miracle of conception, brought forth from nothing, an act, the energy of human will, wailing, and birth. Every work of your being was conformed to an unseen image, written forth as an unwinding thread, thinly drawn from the life that marches between all the order of celless atoms and formless voids. You walk the path paved by every father, daughter, mother and son before you, why fear?


Why do you cry at your death, fret and worry at this cloud?

This is what you are, a cloud, a margin forming out of nothing, vapor rising forth in trails of blood toe to head. This existence is the favor of perfect order in every threaded molecule. Nothingness is not far from you, yet you are here, screaming, beating against it with the same thin heart beat that you had six weeks from your conception...
This will pass, but will you know something more than this life?

What is it that holds you here, still, alive against the dark face of nothing?
Ask,
turn,
and face the question.

In the Evening, Remember

In the evening, the wild wideness of light's colors casts forth a last decree of the sun's beauty. Dark silhouettes of leafless trees leave hearts hungry for something they had missed when the trees stood in lights fullness. The dying light calls forth the worshipping side of man, and we wake up to the light and call after its going, aching for it to stay. We remember its true beauty just as we remember the true beauty of the elder who we love when we see them withered and dying, their life's past glory burning in our hearts in a way we had never known.

I stood in his light ungratefully. I saw him and knew him, saw him and did not esteem him. I did not praise nor beg nor ask nor listen, I went on with life as life was to be on with. But now I see him pass, and my heart cries out to him and praises the beauty I had forgotten. His last light casts itself on those around me leaving only the shapes of things previously known in full. These I knew, these true and beautiful ones I knew but never loved. All the shades of his light were known before, but undiluted I had never honored nor recalled them. The dying, suffering light sets, and my heart breaks and waits. Then I remember:

He has bound himself to his cross. And by his cross he binds himself to us like the sun has tethered itself to the earth. He will arise, and I will see his face and know his grace once more.


May Your dying and reviving always be in our hearts. May Your dawning and evening meet us new every day renewing our remembrance of who You are and what You have done.