....From The Tree Of...............Seeing Beauty
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_______________________________________________________ Hero, September 12th, 2001 We don't know yet why the plane headed for Camp David did a 90 degree turn, straight down and dug a crater in Pennsylvanian soil. No survivors left to us, save this strange thought: maybe one who knew that he would die, and rather than be arrow to a madman, chose to be a hero, short of range -to meteor himself just like a daddy jumps in front of speeding car to save his child. The black box holds his last breath; his death, it holds us. Little Nun Watching Sister Wendy glide through the Kimbel Museum, austere arches and reflecting pools was to watch a sloop with black sails sighing. Movement so subtle she barely moves. Pausing to hold open mammoth, unseen wings, suck it all inside of her and turn, as on a pivot plate and place it into arms also unseen but believed with all her homely, aching heart that we are there to take her offering just like her held out piping hope of God. Meditation On A Brazen Sky Bowl of golden mist, rising shade on shade, gulls cry so far from ocean- rivers tie us to the sea, they say. They ride the tides of life- there are no endings only mystery. Reverence And Recurrance Autumn web of orange and red from trunk to trunk, dapples under a heavier sky held up by apple tree and Pennsylvania banked-barn weathervane. I strain to hear the hawk that kites above me. My car, not far from where my heart hoves year to year to see the final summer rose climb the wall on Cemetery Hill. The marble ball that sits atop an obelisk on Stephen's Knoll is still as pink at sunset. I roll past each beloved spot and say a prayer for all the covered dead, and all the breathing, brethren dead to come; the earth divides again. Wardrums weight the wind. I've come to lay my frightened heart awhile where war has been. The solace of the apple trees, Guernseys on the green hill, calves kick lively at the apple-scented air amid the monuments so white and still. I need to know that life yet flows around the stones engraved with death and even, when it wants to, kicks out blindly, then lays peaceful in the grass. Gettysburg is happening forever, and we come here to see murder become sacrifice, make sense of all the murders that came after- like a balance sheet of freedom for a day like this, a heart that hears its cries and groans and wounds but gives it eyes to see the apples and the spotted cows agraze in days of peace. The Bliss Farm The fields fold out from Emmitsburg Road, beyond the fences, waiting for what used to be the Bliss Farm. Proud barn- the best in Adams County, stone foundation home, the rows of crops that sweetened in the sun... But if you squint, and if the light's just right you'll catch the angle of a roof, a doorframe darker than the air around it; hear the hell and smell the burning boys. Hear cannon and the horses as they plunge away but never, with a blade or weed disturbed. We carry Bliss within us. We are all the turned out homeless, left hand rearing up to fight the right. You'll feel it at the fence- how you were born from this and how you'll never leave it. Apparations One hundred thirty nine years after the horror, the unspeakable horrors of instant death and the more abhorrent dying by degrees with dysentery, slow spread of gangrene the malodorous wrong-headed hope of laudable pus- the deaths by thirst, the harrowing gutshot, gored by metal blown to mist by exploding cannister I sit in a small motel room at the edge of the first day's fighting at the railroad cut, and contemplate instead the iridescent, pearly wings of a tiny moth that's chosen my index finger to lite; so close to me I see its pinpint ocular dots, and eyelash-sized bent legs. A beating life poised where its own is so precarious. Like the boys who stopped at the lip of land outside this bedroom window, equally beautiful and fleeting, heart rendingly mortal, in the blink of their existance before flight, and whatever wings were given them at their transubstantiation into particles of light. I have the strangest feeling the moth knows where we go; how nothing is as we've dreamed, how the miracle is always life itself, our acceptance of the gift, the unutterable wonder, the mute spector of its leaving just as miraculously and swift to somewhere equally strange and haunting in its inability to explain or understand itself. We move from mystery to mystery, as moths: a moment here, a moment there, the dying part of the process, yet we lament as those we love are changed from flesh to light, until we enter the shaft ourselves to join the music and the shimmering forever- that's not fog there on the ridge, it's something animate, come to lite a while and heavy with secrets and if spirits smile, it smiles. Once Only The ends of days are eggshells: broken, scattered, never to be restored to perfect, ovoid wholeness. The pieces much bigger seeming than the egg itself, and jagged. Sharp; impossible to recall the morning moment when everything was white unadulterated and clean. We are crates of eggs waiting to drop. We make patterns or chaos, retain the tension of yoke or tear the membrane through- share the rich yellow, spread our proteins: mate, fornicate, dry on one another's pages, the tempera of art or the unwashable stains of mistake, we're falling eggs -too beautiful to break, but always at the ends of days we walk with bare feet cross the crunch and know we've been up to something -and that it's unrepeat able. Codicil No matter what side of the bed I wake up on, no matter the climate, tide or hours spent in counting sheep or counting beans the whole day through, there is a thin thread of luxurious blue that ties one thought, one act to next- it is so fine a thing, unless you carried it too, you would not know it's there, but it holds the heart to the brain, the foot to the path, these eyes on heaven pulling me to the greater meaning in everything I do from feeding cats to humming quietly in cars: I am alive I am alive for a reason my unreasoning can never presume; only faith will give an answer if asked. There is a cunning in the Creator who smiles and holds it all, myself included. Waking Is A Process What do you do when you wake in the middle of a world of echo nothing new, the sights and sounds worn as the threadbare heels of socks and the air between the tree branches is greenish. Birdsong sounds are underwater bleeps of sonar muffled in an atmosphere that feels like phlegm. Here's what I do: look at something, one thing with the concentration of a cobra for instance, my ankle bone. See it white and sharp against the mossy rug as background with the thin veins of life zigzagging through. Really see it first as an object, separate, connected it in its sharp curve of bone beauty to the rest of me, then me to the thickened air and in my ears, the bleeps become cheeps become real twitterers whose hunger in the trees is understood. Their happiness is loud as I feel my heart's boom boom boom boom to all of it. Slipping Into Time Earlier and earlier it takes to rise to find an empty slate where the only footprints in the dew are mine. Traffic still a steady snake of lights without congestion without stop and start already scarring up the day with hesitation cuts that bleed the nerves; this curve of earth the sun has barely caught is where I sneak from sleep and slip into the movement while my heart still tricks the praise from the lips of the child I am at four a.m., the one I love, the one who believes that anything is possible. On To Page 6 .............. Return To Contents This site sponsered by 
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