Passing through Common Time

He thought the worst was past
the day the doctors removed the bandages.
He could remember the look of the bones
having bit through from the inside,
sliding their way free of his borders.
Now that they seemed again
safely swaddled in his own skin,
progress was being made.

He imagined healing to be a hill,
with a sweaty and painful ascent,
followed by lunch and
a cooling walk down to the waiting car.

But the muscles screamed their refusal
everyday.  The red and bumpy skin
stretched over hip, thigh, and knee
asserted its own unhurried interest in change, and
his leg seemed unconcerned with the whole
ugly and pathetic process.

Eventually,
after years of strange stretching and pulling
and daily rituals of twists and reaches,
after day after day after day
of salves and massages,
the worst of the pain subsided.

But still his skin looked red and waxy;
his gait, uneven.

His doctor simply said,
"Welcome to your new body.
There is nothing wrong with it.
You just don't like it as much
as you think you liked your old body,
but which I happen to remember
you also complained about."

The next day he woke up
at peace with his body:
isn't that what we want to say?

I don't know that it isn't possible, only
that it seems improbable,
given that I do not love
my body, and I am not convinced
that you love yours.

virgin saint

when virginity meant an intact hymen
and i wanted to be on swim team
(which entailed tampons),
i supposed that i had lost
my perfection
at fourteen
in a pool bathroom with wet
concrete floors and blue
stalls.

when virginity meant no penises
having passed inside a vagina,
i supposed that i had lost
a childlike stupidity
in bed,
(ostensibly) in love,
at eighteen.

i am thirty-one now, and can't tell you
what virginity means.
only that i am glad saints
ursula and winifride
and lucia and mary
seem to have known something about it,
which might mean virginity
can be known something about.

On Fugues and Ayres

If I remember correctly, the old runes from Northern Europe weren't only letters in the way we've come to know them.  Letters, to us, do little more than denote phonetic sounds.  Runes were believed to have healing properties in some way that was both physical and spiritual.  A specific rune might be carved out for you when you were suffering from a certain ailment.  The rune - a letter, a spoken frequency, and a piece of a word - was a cure in itself.

Sometimes I come to church with a settled mind.  Not so today.  My thoughts feel chaotic and unsure of their mooring.  And as church often has a way of taking my head and setting it back in its proper place, of even occasionally giving rise to a small epiphany, of answering some enormous question that all too often contributes to the chaos, I am here today with solemn expectations.

Solemn somehow means heavy, even somber.

Please, Please, I seem to beg of the mass - give me something, help me somehow.  Fix me.

But then the bird called Bach comes swooping into the room, everything about him insisting on a kind of solemn joy.  There is no heaviness, no brooding question.  The fugue glitters, makes no lasting promises, and is gone.  Little if anything of the mass seems to stick today except the music.

And then the mass is ended with Purcell.  Even as Dido is dying, Purcell can't seem to be somber, and he is no different here in his "Ayre in C."  All light and moving shadows, water gliding to and fro.

Before we started taking ourselves so seriously, European Christians seemed to understand that pleasure and pain were passing - that we were passing through this world - and music and art helped keep the momentum going.

I find today that momentum is all I was looking for.

Some air, room to breathe, for my brain to disencumber itself, rather than forming any more supposedly brilliant thoughts.  The mind seems to crave its own disturbance with this constant accumulation of thoughts: images, fantasies, plans, memories.  For all of these, the Church has its own rune:

'tis the name that whoso preacheth
speaks like music to the ear:
who in prayer this name beseecheth
sweetest comfort findeth near.


Note:  I apologize for the late date on this posting.  This was written in response to the mass on August 7, the eighth Sunday after Pentecost.  I was slightly delayed through my own distraction, but further delayed by my desire to locate the names of the composers of the pieces that struck me.  The piece by Bach was his Prelude and Fugue in F major.  Purcell's Ayre in C was also mentioned, and the lyrics printed at the end were translated, in 1861, from a 15th century Latin hymn.

According to the Flesh

Washing blueberries this morning, I piled
a few ripe pints into one bowl. There they waited
until lunch, when we discovered that the bottom-most berries
had burst open.

The body of matter fails somehow,
it is not strong enough to bear its own weight. The hip
slips, the branch snaps under a fresh snowfall.
And the names

shift, tilt at a new angle, confusing us in
their seeming familiarity. Washing
a dead man or gutting a fish,
their names might return for a moment.
But for now,

we have just eaten our lunch,
and are now eating vanilla ice cream. My stomach,
you see, also revolts at those darker moments.
But the proper names,

the grunt of your enemy's voice in your ear,
telling you who you are -
I could wish for
the courage to ask for that.