What is Energy? What is Joy?
To bathe each atom of your flesh
in the most beautiful name of God.
Could you find fragrance in a flower
not rooted in the soil?
Could you find truth in a mind
not rooted in quietness?
Could you find fire in a heart
not rooted in the music of love?
Surrender to the one whose breath
makes a sweet sound in your chest.
Listen to the whisper that draws you
gently down into the silent light
that created the stars.
_________
Blessed Eid Al-Adha to all my Muslim friends!
This must be why we have "service animals." In the depths of night, when
I wake in despair of the world, I reach out and touch the warmth of
this little dog. As soon as I feel the golden softness, my negative
energy discharges into some ancient ground beyond the ken of human
intellect, and I fall back to sleep in peace. Once again I have been
blessed by the Kingdom of the Fur, and redeemed by a Grace that flows,
not from above, but from below. Thank you, Willy.
The kind of evening that melts
the Breyer's over my peach pie,
finally a breeze of welcome on the porch,
one star rising in a lapis sky, bruised pink -
I settle by a stifled rose to listen for a cricket,
watch for a firefly and remember...
In this meditation one must leave
the TV on inside, just loud enough
to hear the ball game, a prayer
to my grandfather, who loved the Orioles.
And I think of the pale driver
of the ice cream truck, his sad chimes.
I remember the way heat lightning rumbled
all night with no rain, and how
at golden noon the plastic tasted
as I inflated the bright blue seahorse
with all the breath of the sky inside.
I remember the mysterious odor of water in a hose,
delicious, cool and rubbery out of the earth;
musk of primeval spring house and that plop
of the amphibian abyss;
hum of an Evenrude vanishing into silence
over the brackish Chesapeake,
August sadness of outboard motors,
their slick rainbows on still water;
the heron standing all afternoon on one leg,
a penitent, finally ascending on twilit wings;
and over the alfalfa field, a blessed mist
enfolding somnambulant horses swishing black tails
all night against mosquitos;
the morning glories sprawled on fence posts,
waiting to be born again:
these are my late summer sutras,
evidence of things not seen, but recollected,
prayers that guide me deeper
into the Presence that remembers nothing.
