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Tag: faith

The Only Baseball Fact I Know

In 1980 the Yomiuri Giants
signed outfielder Gary Thomasson
for 1.2 million dollars

which he used to birth
a metaphor by sitting
on the bench, hitlessly waving

his bat and spinning,
they said, like
a Giant Human Fan.

And so ‘Thomasson’ came to
represent a contradictory remnant
within our built environment.

Once usefully functional,
now functionally useless,
yet conspicuously maintained.

A doorknob in a wall;
a bridge connecting two halves of air;
a spiral staircase, leading

I don’t know how much God
spent building me, and I could
probably figure the maintenance

from gas bills and groceries
and Netflix subscriptions but
I know the cost to save me

so I so often pray that I am
more than a doorless balcony and
that he would, once, tell me

where my stairs

Published in Strange City Digest, Fall 2020.

Unaccompanied Minor

I don’t know
what
angelic aerodynamics were involved
in sending Christ from his Father’s
right hand to Mary’s womb
but when my son took
off toward his grandparents at
140 knots my heart leapt
to follow with stubby wings
which floundered
in his wake and I
wasn’t even sending him
to be crucified
only coddled by flight
attendants who knew
exactly who
he was.

An Ounce of Pretension

There are few opening lines more pretentious than
‘I have a hot tub’—maybe ‘I don’t own a TV’ or

‘I read The Economist’—but it’s true and anyway
it’s for my wife’s fibromyalgia and it was on sale

and there’s no other way to explain the leaves that
become trapped and float unnoticed to the surface

sink beneath the jets lost in the flotsom to wind
between our toes and lay at the bottom of this

chemical bath dying as we relax color fading like
an astronaut without oxygen who can’t keep her

eyes open as the warnings flash 15 10 5 3 percent
red through her eyelids but she’s long since succumbed

to an isolated slumber and slipped down to death to
wind between God’s toes, a leaf in the filter but

he still knows her name.

Three Counts

I cannot draw
but I did
my best to gild
the functional canvas of
his
field-trip lunch sacks
with apple trees and
iron gates and
atoms and books.

(It was the only way
I could be
there and anyway
PB&J
is boring enough.)

The truth wasn’t,
though.
Needed neither apples nor atoms
to make it
any more
there
but we can’t help
ourselves with
such scintillating sin.

(We save our
sharpest
crayons for the
cleanest
lines of our
deepest
fears.)

Still
I wanted to draw
that Sunday,
as someone stood
in your stead,
the way you were:
hands raised in blessing
bouncing on your feet
so willing to
love
us and me and them and
him
as God so
loved
the world
with, surely, angels
at your side and behind
and around.

But I could only
see a darkness
billow from
organ pipes
to claim your shadow,
sneak from
under choir robes
wrap your wrists
(again)
in chains and
the laughter couldn’t’ve
been yours because you
were screaming
as its claws sunk beneath
your soul.

So instead
I wept
because I have such trouble
drawing hands.

Published in Strange City Digest, Winter/Spring 2021.

My Life As an Adverb

in the beginning was the Word;
it has/will been/be, ever since/more.

some (words) are more
import-
signific-
relev-
ant than others, without
which the story is lost or
meaning less.

some ARE, some DO,
while some ARE/DO both while
never break-
ing
stride.

the others, though,
gild and embellish
are clutter and noise,
momentary-
ily
worthy of a roughshod draft;
unworthy, certain-
ly,
of eternity.

do they know if they
ARE or DO or do they
wait, anxious-
ly,
for the sharp, red pen?

Sandcastle

‘I don’t know,’ I say to those who ask.
And I don’t. Know.
Why the spires, rifts, domes.
Why the channels, depressions, slopes.
Why spheres.
‘Maybe you should’, says my son, ‘build an actual…castle?’
But I know
what those are, and what they’re for.
So they stop to explore these abstralien sandscapes,
wondering
at the meaning of my creation, and my purpose.
No plan guides my tremorous fingers that
mold and shape and smooth the forms
that form without me.
Arches fall and towers crumble, collapse under
misplaced knees and thoughtless feet.
These places weren’t meant to be, let alone
last even through a day or night or hour.
They are self-serving, imposing haphazard order
on an idle chaos minding its own business.
God took six days, so they say, plus time to rest,
yet I spare only the morning
because I have other plans.
They, too, are as hasty in their admiration which
so fickley turns to mischievous destruction by
toddlered toes, unleashed paws, and cruelty.
Even seagulls are dismissive of my walls, perching with
prejudice until the structures crack to expose
my lack, and my depravity.
Six days seems equally rash, short-sighted and shrifted
given the scope of eternity, of all the hairs on all our heads.
So we blear and smear and have trod among
God’s almighty spires in ignorance and arrogance,
wondering
at His meaning, and His purpose.
Yet He had no other plans and
His fingers do not tremble, and
His walls were built counting on our cruelty to
crack them
and expose yet more layers of perfection.

* Stand if you are able.

My grandmother would make them,
large-knit in green, red, and white:
thick cables of yarn as cylindrical
camouflage for rolls of toilet paper, or
insulation against pots of chicken and dumplings.

Her shawl reminded me of these,
though white and splotched with dollops of
yellow surrounded by petaled pink and blue.
She wore it each week,
rain or shine, Epiphany or Lent.

(Truth be told, the church can be cold.)

She arrived, shuffling; sat, shuddering,
and her son helped her, lowered her, down.
She stayed, bent, forward over her hands
as we stood shaking hands and sharing peace.

The asterisk asked her to
* Stand if you are able.
Not a command of passive-aggressive guilt, but
suggestion and instruction. A lesson
in humility for those who don’t know or have forgotten:
in worship, in respect, in joy, we stand.

And each week she stood,
rain or shine, Advent or Easter.
Fingers curled and gripping the pew;
not pushed but pulled, drawn, and called
to her feet with patience,
without hesitation.

Her son’s hands holding the hymnal.

Lilou

I.

Strange, to say that a mother
has
‘lost’
her baby.
That such a wonder could be mis
-placed; such a love,
so careless.

It implies guilt and fault,
a moment
of inattention in
a moment
when there is anything
but.

Though who dares? Who brave or soulless
enough to speak the actual words that

A.
Child.
Has.
Died.

To name the thing? Give face to the fear;
voice to the dark?

Except the curse has fallen
without having been spoken.
A breathless and wordless strike.
No word, no breath,
could have or did have
stopped it,
despite our most loquacious prayers
which, in the end, were nameless.

II.

This loss runs contrary
to expectations
that our children
(a child)
are
(is)
innocent and inviolately safe because
we are there, inviolating.

For surely Joseph, just a man,
just a father,
was tense in his stabled vigil,
keeping watch of the sheep and ass and cattle
for signs of sudden movement.
Hooves behind this line because
this child is mine.

Son of God, yes; yet, too, Son of Joseph.
(Who was told the name, but
was he who gave it.)

Sent to protect but, first,
to be im/perfectly protected.

Our protection, in the end, is never enough.

III.

As, in less than a moment, did God speak
the Word,
so did your soul-spark catch and flame;
soft and sublime.
A light where there had been none.

As, in that un-moment, all that was/is/will be
flowered and filled Creation,
so did you expand and collide in measured beats
to become.

And so are you conserved.
Neither created nor destroyed,
neither present nor absent.

What has been named cannot be unnamed.
What dreamed, unseen.
What loved, in the end,

lost.

Published in Strange City Digest, Winter/Spring 2021.

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