Spring Light

Some dam of winter
dark is breached by days
and then it’s bright
and breezy everywhere,
the trees in one abundant
sway, tidally awash
in brilliant light
and lifted in white song.
Your ecstasy abounds
high up those boughs,
nursed on dreamy paps
of fresh-washed blue
and bowered in a
pale green now leafing
everywhere. I’ve heard this
song for almost 50 years
and still it raptures me,
feathering these words
with gratitude and tears
in the aeries of Your bliss.
Feel the way the whole
moment here -- forever
early afternoon, streets
empty, between some
daily task and the next --
lifts and spreads huge
wings and spirals up
the air on some thermal
of pure song choired
by the trees softly
swaying round my home,
that precinct where love’s
frail so perfect flowers
into that watery and
windy light are thrown.

***


SABBATHS 1986 I

Wendell Berry

from A Timbered Choir


Slowly, slowly they return
To the small woodland let alone;
Great trees, outspreading and upright,
Apostles of the living light.

Patient as stars, they build in air
Tier after tier a timbered choir,
Stout beams upholding weightless grace
Of song, a blessing on this place.

They stand in waiting all around,
Uprisings of their native ground,
Downcomings of the distant light;
They are the advent they await.

Receiving sun and giving shade,
Their life's a benediction made,
And is a benediction said
Over the living and the dead.

In fall their brightened leaves, released,
Fly down the wind, and we are pleased
Top walk on radiance, amazed.
O light come down to earth, be praised!



***

TRYING TO PRAY

James Wright

This time, I have left my body behind me, crying
In its dark thorns.
Still,
There are good things in this world.
It is dusk.
It is the good darkness
Of women's hands that touch loaves.
The spirit of a tree begins to move.
I touch leaves.
I close my eyes and think of water.




SPRING

Mary Oliver

This morning
two birds
fell down the side of the maple tree

like a tuft of fire
a wheel of fire
a love knot

out of control as they plunged through the air
pressed against each other
and I thought

how I meant to live a quiet life
how I meant to live a life of mildness and meditation
tapping the careful words against each other

and I thought—
as though I were suddenly spinning, like a bar of silver
as though I had shaken my arms and lo! they were wings—

of the Buddha
when he rose from his green garden
when he rose in his powerful ivory body

when he turned to the long dusty road without end
when he covered his hair with ribbons and the petals of flowers
when he opened his hands to the world.


from West Wing (1997)

***


SPRING TIDE

2004

Spring in Florida has washed
over us so clear and fragrant
these past few days as to
immerse us in a drowse
and a dream of heavenly
song, the breeze sweet with
orange and jasmine blossom,
the sky so heartbreakingly
blue, the pale green trees
whispering of lower
urgencies as the huge oak
boughs lift and cast us all,
like wave-spume, back
here. Wild. Yet is this sudden
thrall of God, the sea, or
of some paler propinquity,
the spirit of this not
so much lifting wings as
sprouting fins to fan an
emerelding blue? Spring
washes over us in a wave
and we emerge at dusk
spluttering and anointed,
our heart no longer ashore,
but far and deep and wild
in a vaster bliss which no
one walks or wake from.
It happened to me long
ago, when I was 14 and
stretching long exactly
when the groves awoke to
pour their white brandies
into the ladling breeze.
One day I woke smelling
that low sweetness in
the window and then
felt some inner beach
of flesh awake, washed
pure and clean
of any music beyond
that grove-wild sphere.
The angel-whitened
floss of my wings turned
right then a feral blue,
my hand reaching under
the sheets to translate
that boozy scent across
the sheets. Singing or
flinging back all I heard in
that waking, racing spring
day. That was 30 years
ago, and though my hand
now holds a more articulate
device (surely though a
more minor fin), the jots
are still as hot and hard,
the end just as imprecise,
my thrall no less for having
said it just so. Oh I can
smell that green whisky
rising from the dark just
now, curved and immortal
as the one so long ago
who washed her breasts
all over me and then
ebbed back into the grove
back and down of soul
to wait and sing and pray
and make a home of
the hole she tore in me.


***



A MEMORY OF SPRING IN 1977


1995

On a killer spring afternoon
Dave and Sunny and me piled
into Dave’s old Mustang
and drove fast out of town.
Warm air rushed through
the open windows, mixing
like booze with the Rolling Stones'
"Hot Stuff" blaring on the radio.

We passed a joint
and a bottle of Gallo red
as the far suburbs of Spokane
unwound into wheat fields
and foothills.
I sat in the back seat
watching Sunny and Dave talk
and wondered which of
us she would choose.
Sunny wasn’t really pretty
but she laughed easily
and had these big warm
breasts you just wanted
to bury your face in.

We drove up Mount Spokane
on a rough dirt road, spotting
deer, two eagles, a bear
looking ragged and mean.
Up top we uncoiled from
the Mustang like kids at recess,
buzzing on spring and booze
and sex and sunlight,
shouting words that faded fast
into such immensity.
Spokane to the east was
a quilt of buildings woven
into a greater one
of wheat and timber
and everlasting blue sky.

When we sat down to finish off
the wine there was a giddy pause
where I was as happy as
I ever would be.
Then it passed. I got drunk.
I only thought about
getting Sunny alone
and out of that blue
blue halter top.

And when I did,
later that night,
there was a full moon
in the window blasting pale
light over the sheets and
naked Sunny. And I
sure did enjoy filling
my hands with her breasts,
feeling her heart pound so
heavy and sure deep in
that luxuriant flesh.

The memory of Mount Spokane
and Sunny's breasts
washed by that moon
drives the spring of 1977
one day and one night
deeper into that
other immensity we are.


***


SPRING BLESSING

March 2004

Yes, I built this aerie
to toss white sails
on the sea, but You are
the salt breeze which
stirs its boughs into
a daily song. Your grace
touches my hand as I
grasp a skull crupper
and haul up new words
for old seas. Such
a breeze in the windows
this morning, spring-fisted
and warm for this dark
hour, stirring roots and
balls and breasts toward
fullness, the wet ejaculate
cry which tears you free
and we begin. Last night
such a full moon hauled
over our house as
I climbed in my car to
drive for takeout,
this small town’s night
anointed with Brigid’s
lucent smile, her pale
white caul praying over
tidy streets and kempt
houses, the slow traffic
heading out of town,
the lake to my left
a wide black glass
singing brilliant antiphons
of moonlight.

Then I smelled the season’s
first orange blossoms
—or rather that sweet
drowsy warmth poured
cup by cup into the
window as I drove
past the grove, brimming
my every sense: And
it was Brigid kissing the
fingertips of the king’s
inarticulate sons before
they pulled harps from
the walls and held
those strange shapes
for the first time and
began to play all the
old songs, all that night
and for the rest of
their lives. Your blessing
there and here, Master
and Mistress of Wells,
pouring such blue waters
from my mouth’s fingertips,
the pen in my frigate hand
a glen in blossom and
shrieking sweetness
throughout your lost land.



***

SABBATHS 1985 I

Wendell Berry


Not again in this flesh will I see
the old trees stand here as they did,
weighty creatures made of light, delight
of their making straight in them and well,
whatever blight our blindness was or made,
however thought or act might fail.

The burden of absence grows, and I pay
daily the grief I owe to love
for women and men, day and trees
I will not know again. Pray
for the world’s light thus borne away.
Pray for the little songs that wake and move.

For comfort as these lights depart,
recall again the angels of the thicket,
columbine aerial in the whelming tangle,
song drifting down, light rain, day
returning in song, the lordly Art
piecing out its humble way.

Though blindness may yet detonate in light,
ruining all, after all the years, great right
subsumed at last in paltry wrong,
what do we know? Still
the presence that we come into with song
is here, shaping the seasons of His wild will.