No, You Must Still Sit in Gardens

It's always a daunting thing to be glued
to the roads that we walked.
You can make your hands mark the street lines
for four hundred paces, explaining.
Rehearse that road with me, I say from behind this lovely, rusted patina. 
Mesh your hands with the yellow paint.
Explicate, recollect.
We children often bury cars and trains in this
                             deep earth
but are never found in mounds ourselves.
                                          Except for these days.
In this interval, the pines still turn.
In this interval, the cracked wheat of your fingers
is sifting through the picture box,
each armoire and empty dollhouse,
the swing bellies and tire treads.
In this interval, the houseboats, low in the bloated green water,
are still leaving port.
These portraits of where we stood are delicate.

This is not how your tired arms wanted to rest,
cleaning your own spilled milk in the street
and eating with only one lamp on.
My tiny name, still written in the
dust on the coffee table, neighbor to the house fern,
will remain in your mind as the houseboats, stationary and moving - -
silt and tokens in your morning/mourning robe pocket,
preserving and preserving my return
to the root of it all.

I place my hand on this drift.

This scene is what it is: acquainted. 
I rest like old rusty coins at the bottom of that lake,
burrowed into the bottom of a mechanic's jacket,
but that's not who gave it to me.
It's novel and fitting like our professor's leather suitcase
but with the latch unbuckled and flapping as he walks.
I could lay on the back of the couch this afternoon,
feel the back vertebral column synchronize my spine
and be still.
Yesterday, when i sat stroking the skeleton of a fan,
I remembered the pearl cufflink I found on the windowsill,
rare like an owl feather.
O keep us from the flash of the world.
Unbend, unbend, and hinge;
this pleads raw and organic and unconcealed.
A lone bulb wrung from a power line,
shattered under the weight.
But the shards have a pulse.
They're beating on the ground.


Sometimes old things get meshed in

keeping the clock wound.

lewis carroll (alice in wonderland) was a storyteller, an artist, as well as a mathematician, and artists often have a more profound sense of what time is all about than do the scientists. there's a story of a small village (about the size of the village near Crosswicks) where lived an old clockmaker and repairer. when anything was wrong with any of the clocks or watches in the village, he was able to fix them, to get them working properly again. when he died, leaving no children and no apprentice, there was no one left in the village who could fix clocks. soon various clocks and watches began to break down. those which continued to run often lost or gained time, so they were of little use. a clock might strike midnight at three in the afternoon. so many of the villagers abandoned their timepieces.
one day a renowned clockmaker and repairer came through the village, and the people crowded around him and begged him to fix their broken clocks and watches. he spent many hours looking at all the faulty timepieces, and at last he announced that he could repair only those whose owners had kept them wound, because they were the only ones which would be able to remember how to keep time.
so we must daily keep things wound: that is, we must pray when prayer seems dry as dust; we must write when we are physically tired, when our hearts are heavy, when our bodies are in pain.

we may not always be able to make our "clock" run correctly, but at least we can keep it wound so that it will not forget.

- madeleine l'engle

repose.

My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest. Exodus 33:14

the lift away.

so i enrolled in this poetry class for fall semester. first day of class i knew id come home: the professor had little pictures of aesthetically pleasing birds and plants and lanterns all over the syllabus for no reason at all. and she attempted a one-word-per-slide powerpoint, but then explained to the class that she wasn't very technologically advanced and didn't care much for powerpoints anyways (we had only gotten through one slide when this came up). perfect, right?
it's so wonderful, but i'm quickly seeing that this class is bringing me places i did not plan on going and unlocking little safe parts that i didn't plan on unlocking. i thought it would be fairly simple - go to class, read some poems, go to my dorm, write some poems. i would insert some clever and witty diction every so often, and that would be that. but really, things have been coming out that i didn't even know existed down there in the bottom of my mind. i'm loving it and hating it as it's surfacing things that i need to deal with and be honest with myself about, but it's completely engrossing at the same time. i'm discovering a really hardened and compact place that needs to be broken, and that hurts. instead of picking away at the pebble chips on the surface, this class (or more directly, the Lord) has handed me a sledgehammer. i know there will be all sorts of grace and redemption and loving from His side so I can only assume this unsettling and ruffling of my spirit is natural. why would i need grace-love if that perfectly sinful part of me wasn't blasting to the surface, per usual? i think my spiritual poverty is turning from black/white to color very quickly. needless to say, i'm still a bit insecure about what these poems look like, but if anything, it's started the blog-flow again. have missed this a little.