When shining manse’s gleam occludes
What it purports to glorify
A restless mind finds little rest
And no epiphany of grace
To smooth the brow of fulsome face
Or birth a passion in the breast
Proclaiming that the Lord is nigh.
Pale curate’s words and coping dance
To make insensate visible
A harlot’s gambit must assay
When Word of omnipresent mind
Is found ‘mongst blinkered if not blind
Whose narrowness is not the Way
And renders such speech risible.
But Augustine did well describe
The void of soul that must be filled;
When prophets’ words remain arcane
And mystic step of divine dance
Is shrunk to stale obedience
More human verse and soft refrain
Give voice to what the Church has stilled.
For clothed in frail humanity
Has ever come the silent Word,
A thunderous cataract of grace
Whose breath does not a dry leaf stir,
But without gold or scent of myrrh
Wrings echoes from the poets’ race
In shouts of what they’ve dimly heard.
The earnest, seeking Divine speech,
Leaves thus the templed feast and rite
To seek the vales and holy streams
Where rumors of Communion dwell
As authors’ declamations tell,
And Faulkner’s deeply lyric dreams
Are better guide than tepid priest.
To where the fir and balsam branch
Fly up to buttress all the sky
And antiphons of chickadee
Hymn up the streamside liturgy
Where poet’s mystic symmetry
Conjoined with earth alchemic’lly
Sets free the pilgrim’s longing sigh,
The postulant processes here;
His singing line in arc is cast,
An Angelus flung to the vault,
Seeking target invisible
And a bond indivisible,
Provoking the spirit’s assault
To wrestle like Jacob at last.
When silver is rising again,
Shook forth from the river’s cold foil,
The object of soul’s longing quest
Incarnate now in fishy flesh
…and Communion’s discovered afresh.
Could pallid monks ever have guessed
How Logos fulfills His long toil?
Or would they who sought deserts and caves,
And against barren piety raged,
Preached sermons to birds and to bees,
Or sought vistas within a small cell
Unsurprised, know that Jacob’s deep Well
Is found with the Kingdom’s sharp keys
Where true labor and speech are engaged?