Mid-March,
Morning,
Balsam air.
Here, there,
Birds flit,
Twitter,
Sit like notes on the staffs
Of the scores of the bare branches.
All is on the verge.
On the ridge-tops, blue surges,
Scattering bibulous cloud
Hung over from night.
Blue strides down the green valley,
Embracing the willows,
Lovely in light gowns,
Shaking their tresses,
Their lemon tresses,
Laughing in welcome.
Across the hills, meanwhile,
Like salt grains on baize cloth,
Sheep graze solemnly,
And the Charolais cattle,
Sculpted in chalk,
Stand motionless,
Outside of time.
The Bowl
Under light, O bowl, paint for me,
By dahlias and peaches interposed,
The coral edges of a tropical sea.
Reflect your maker’s Maker’s merriment
At costumes lent by fruits and blooms
To your curvaceous finery.
Your colors whoop like schoolgirls out of class;
Like twinned lips of lovers pulled close
By beauty’s sweet force,
They quiver.
I nudge the glass,
The water stirs.
The sea on beaches at the world’s end sloshes,
The lovers sway among the blossoms.
Ocean sighs.
Late sun dyes the bowl vermilion.
I jar the glass again.
Creatures spring to life, myriad.
“Father, the circus is in town—
Can we go?”
We skip all the way.
Why, this is creation!
The world’s being born!
Elephants stomp through purple dahlias,
Tigers pad on beds of peaches,
Jesters quilt the glass with motley—
Shalom!
Your rim, O bowl, marks out the planet’s edge;
Your oceans breed whales;
Your womb is great with clouds and plants and beasts;
In your depths nebulae gleam.
O bowl, sun-bearer, in you
Light figures the invisible.
Your harmonics paint
Heavenly frescoes;
In your radiance
Alpha echoes Omega.
Shalom
Art
Art is given to hint at depths
Beyond the shallow pools
We spend our lives in,
Dull fools,
Mincing like waders when we might sprint
And plunge into the sea!
What is that deep sea?
The sweep of foam down a wave’s face
Pictures unsolicited grace
Rolling from eternity
To cover broken time.
The puffed cloud’s rhyme,
With chestnut trees
That caparison summer hills
And garrison the ripening fields,
Points to sublime structures of creation.
All speaks of relation,
Transformation,
Of inherent links
Binding galaxies to the pinks
That flower on the wall outside my house.
God’s grand art above
Crafts these paradigms:
Playful signs of Love
That our invention mimes.
Mountain Stream
Oh, ecstasy of the enfolding cold stream
Clasping my limbs between the hills,
Issue of the run of snowmelt
Off high peaks, rippling in rills
Down the mountains to make a silver seam!
Hour by hour the broiling sun grills
My back as I toil up rocky trails,
Through fern and fireweed, over windfall,
Under placid pines with green tales
Of light and shade and silence on the old hills.
Where the purling stream awaits me sails
An eagle, circling slowly: sign
In heaven, like Christ’s bright star,
That Living Waters run here, mine
For the taking: that here the Lord unveils
His luminous glory. Waters, shine!
Quicksilver, flash! Make mountains sing!
Oh, listen! Currents rush, hissing;
Stones clunk on the bottom, thumping;
Air clamors; keen wind zithers in pine.
Waked out of heat by the sonorous ring
Of rocks and the quick-running stream,
I ease my limbs down into cold’s
Bracing clasp, cold’s blue dream
Of liquid motion, and, borne, go slipping
Over drowned rocks, by sunken trees,
Through a green watery medium,
Below bright bubbles chattering at the surface.
I fin, buried, and all blight
In me is drowned and swept away downstream.
Oh, I ache, recalling that ecstatic flight
Through mountain waters long ago!
There was all my youth contained
And summed; and there, in that pure flow,
Love washed me clean and folded me in Light.
Life’s