Useless poems - 10

*

There was a hand in the sun. It was my hand
yet not my hand. It touched me like a hand
and made me warm. Its substance was the sun.
Or else the person of the sun -- because
I felt intention in that hand -- but not
my own because at that time I had none.
I wanted badly not to block the sun
with my ephemeral trauma. To be healed
I knew I had to slow down, had to yield
and do this not in such a willful way
that the sun became only appliqué.
I had to let the outside enter me
with its most inexplicable caress
to unkink and de-stress my deep distress.

*

Jorge: Flashforward

*

And after his innocence was lost -- or exploded as nonexistent -- Jorge would walk the garden of orthodoxy and watch the birds explode too, as if all the leaves had blown away in a sphere of chatter. So the fall surrounded his fall.

They were not birds but nymphs, the lost nymphs of poetry. They blew out of the trees.

They flew in a burst out of the trees, all the nymphs, all the exiled nymphs. They were too delicate to protect.

You bad man! You bad man! they chattered, as Jorge walked under them and all the roving ones stared after him. You have chased us away! the nymphs cried.

Not me, Jorge answered. I want you here. I love to watch you flashing your little skirts and flying over my head. Or hiding in the trees, which are your abode and possession, after all. Every tree to its nymph.

I have not exiled you. But his heart sank as the nymphs deserted their milieu. And the campus developers scouted yet another piece of land, hungry for dorms, hungry for labs, needing something to fill what they saw as empty absent space.

All this was well after Jorge was defiled. The birds left long ago.

*

Thoughts on place

*

A place is enclosed, unlike space. It might be enclosed by sky but still it is closed. Otherwise how could one even be there? All this nonsense of being somewhere virtually -- forget it!

Perhaps this is why poetry of all the arts captures "place" so well. The lovely click-I'm-closed of end rhyme like the border of one's spiritual dwelling, yours precisely because it doesn't contain or even acknowledge all that space beyond that is *not* yours.

I have never seen a "place" captured in a photograph. Never the buzzing balmy edge of things, that gaseous outline that permeates it and permeates you and makes it yours as it binds you to it. Rarely in a painting, never in a photograph -- except maybe in a black and white photo of old architecture? maybe. Also in sepia stuff and old Civil War hallucinations. And Hitchcock's "The Birds" is full of a specific place.

*

Useless poems - 9

*

A beautiful lostness
(near Covent Garden, 10/3/06)

They move from A to B, they move from B
to A -- and then cancel each other out.
Some move too certainly -- they know their way
too well and don't guess what is blocking it.
The blockage is itself an opening.
To see it, feel it, first you must be lost.
It is a queasiness, a presupposed
for knowing where you are, because to know
is pain, this knowledge is a form of pain.

The grid is in the shape of shattered glass,
it slithers in this dance of randomness,
improvisation. In the broken lane
confusion twists like a kaleidoscope
into perfection and comes to a stop.

*

Useless poems - 8

*

Sonnet of the placement of a place
(London 10-1-06)


To understand the placement of a place
is past impossible -- I dream of it
by walking some monotony of bricks
that suddenly have disappeared. The foot
stands on what isn't there and I wake up.
The terror of support withdrawn conveys
in no logical way the preciousness
of having something under one. But what?
What makes the haunting placement of a place?

You might say time consists of pondering
the deep significance of place -- what is
and isn't, in succession. And the way
it now withdraws is very long and deep
to study. And I go there when I sleep.

*

Useless poems - 7

*

"The hunger not to do so"


In the midst of my acting any act
there comes a voice -- like someone in a room
whose echo is offensive, much too loud
to be so inner and perhaps unreal,

a room that is not meditation but
the hunger for it -- hollowing my act,
a voice that clamors for all acts to stop.
It undermines me and will not shut up.

It has this restlessness as if it were
tied down, yet what it wants is not to move
at all -- it wants to lay my will down on
the floor and walk away -- wants this so much

that now it has become the opposite:
it wishes just to sit -- and cannot sit.

*

Useless poems - 6

*

God in the body


The body has its way -- a laying down
like tracks -- of how it can bend, how it can't --
of how, by definition, it can be.
The soul is in denial. If you say
the soul is what the body lets it be
the words don't even form -- they can't be said.
Our words are like a wiping of the slate
on which they're written. Not that they are false.
Their core is sheer evasion. But their sound
is physical. It is the way a slab
of meat would cope with the emergency
(emergence?) of a leak. Some substance leaks
into and through the damage. Someone speaks
a tell me tell me. Who is it that speaks?

*

Useless poems - 5

*

Judgment


I want to take the coat of judgment off
and lay it folded neatly on the ground.
Someday somebody else can put it on,
not me, not me. I want to take it off.
I won't say that it's bad or dangerous,
I won't even say that the time is wrong
for the garment to be worn, and I won't judge
the one who puts it on, if someone does.
I plan to understand much less of it.
I want to think this out a different way.
I want to hear some things I haven't heard.
The right or wrong of what a person does
will be the sound that comes from a locked room.
I heard it but I didn't make the sound.

*

Useless poems - 4

*

The door


The door opened as pain, opened with pain,
was pain -- the tearing open of a wound.
To be inside the room would be to bleed.
You didn't want to pass through what this was
to pass but had no other, easier,
more civilized, more human avenue
to where the knowledge was nor did you know
what it was that you didn't know, just knew
that there was only one way into it.
Pain with the separating feel, the feel
of isolation -- no one else would know
the special grip that it applied to you
nor were you sick enough to want them to:
it was your door, just yours, yours to pass through.

*

Useless poems - 3

*

The path


There are places and there are paths.
Places become internal. Paths must not.
Your path can't be explained but must be there.
No place exists without a path to it.
Depression is your path to joy.
Depression is crammed full of intense meaning
that can't be used, that really has no point
of access, and becomes unbearable.
You must walk it, which means to fathom it.
Its whole reason to be is where it ends,
your place of understanding. You must not
medicate or deny the path you walk.

Your pain is not to push down but to know.
Your understanding is the way you go.

*

Useless poems - 2

*

An inward world


Why was the trip forward so much like
an excavation? How was it that the path
out of oneself chiseled this inward world?
It was like falling into one's own nerve.
Within the pain one did not feel the pain
but was the pain and became what it meant,
and what it meant was quite impersonal,
a sort of unbounded commodity.
It was an awareness that did not belong
to the one who walked its, let us say, its canyons
and salmon-colored shadows, attributes
of a personage well grounded as a place.

God was not lost. God was at home. God was
the owner of this place. God was the place.

*

Useless Poems - 1

*

A horror of being


You had a horror of the sort of being
that was like standing in a light, exposed
to comment --where this comment was defining,
was itself an exposure and was you.
You wished to be not watched, simply to be
without that light of someone else outside
not understanding and not caring to.
And still it wasn't solitude you sought.
You must try to say nothing but the truth.
What you sought was the "someone else" who was
in fact inside and therefore understood
the ground and underpinning of your being
so hard to hold up to the light -- unless
the light was his not just your emptiness.

*

Jorge - the Garden of Orthodoxy - Part 1

*

You were Jorge.

You looked just like Una, your sister, but with a twist that was indefinable and changed everything.

What was balanced in her face became unbalanced in yours.

What made you more than an ordinary man was that you were a worm and not a man.

When other people talked of self-aggrandizement or even self-improvement you would take a breath and scan that very self. Not theirs but yours.

It was moist, it was long and thin, it moved through the earth and disgusted the people who had to look at it. A worm nature.

Offensive to men. Beautiful to God. God felt an absence of repugnance for the worm, God even loved the worm.

Once you had been a human like the others. Una and you were children, living in the Garden of Orthodoxy.

Orthodoxy is not a set of beliefs, Orthodoxy is a place, a world, a realized wing. It is a place beneath the wing of God. One does not "behave well" there. One is close to God there and all behavior is intrinsically "well".

The wing itself shelters you from other kinds of living that you do not really even understand, the kinds of life that lead or unfathomably come to be led astray, de-winged, the flavors of existence that are no longer effectively attached to existence, which in effect shouldn't even be one of the possibles. Because the Garden was in fact everything and everywhere. And so in some sense the Garden still contained even the people who had simply walked away -- who had walked out of the garden one day, as if temporarily, casually, but fully intending to come back.

For Jorge and Una, the Garden of Orthodoxy was a place of sheer poetry, because God was there. They were little children, they took the bliss for granted. The taking for granted was itself the substance of bliss. One moved freely in the shelter of what was not anxious and would never need to be. For the garden thrived in the indifference of time -- not that time was absent or even suspended -- not that time ceased to do whatever it did -- but the concern was a thing that lived miles away, "in the next county", far on the other side of the stiles and hedges and small shimmering animals. There was not the constant bruising reference to time, the looking at one's watch that was said to be the definition of adulthood.

Only protected can one be free.

*

The light was horizontal like the branches of certain trees. How can it be like that? Una asked. Doesn't it come straight down. How are there shadows on these red barks instead of the ground.

I think the light comes oozing out of these dark places, Jorge said. The light comes second, the dark comes first, I think we see things in reverse -- the source is more mysterious than what we see.

The sunlight flows every which way from these dark places. The foundation is darkness -- light is like something placed on top. It's not as real.

Well, should we be scared? I'm not scared at all.

They would look back at the house. Sometimes the back door was open, sometimes Aunt Estelle, practically a widow, was standing on the porch. She wasn't monitoring them, she was simply there. She was always half doing something and half listening to the sound of children's voices. So it seemed.

Her little prayer book in her lap. The children turned and dismissed her from consciousness but not completely. Aunt Estelle. Warm and quiet. Touching the links of the chain on her neck as though it were -- almost a rosary or some such thing.

There was a pond in the back yard, the keeper of the moist stones. Tadpoles and the whiff of frogs. Fish who would surface for food and then suddenly sink into nonexistence, if existence is appearance. Beyond it, more fields and the touch of forest. The land was too still to belong to anyone. In hide and seek, so many hiding places, one had to make the effort to be found. Pine needles on the pathway, don't run barefoot. Smells of honey and tar.

There was the preternatural clarity of an intense single moment. Yes but it went on for years and years.

Look at the way those branches -- those pine branches, those branches of pine -- they almost make a square, the way they are posed in the clearing. And look at that three legged dog!

Una and Jorge wanted to catch the dog and make it a pet but -- oddly and wonderfully enough -- it ran too fast to be caught.

As though its piercing disfigurement needed to be -- here and only here -- caressed and furthered -- within the Garden of Orthodoxy that bound them all.

So the dog ran, free and free forever. And the 2 children knew better than to chase it into the infinity in which it lived.

For they knew -- and this was the Orthodoxy -- not to go too far.

Did they know? In fact, did they? Dusk would be falling, not the dusk, but the state just before dusk, a sort of tableau of clear glareless light, the anticipation of gloom. The outer woods were ahead of them, with the big campus on the other side. We'd better go back, Una said. Dinner will be waiting for us.

At the edge of the wood was where the feeling of rightness began to thin, like scarce oxygen on a mountain height.

Una, protected by an instinct her brother didn't have, would pull at his hand. The aunt would be waiting patiently for them at the back door. It was amazing how dark it suddenly was, how quickly the day's light had been sucked away. But oh how good existence was!

END OF PART ONE

*

Poem: A Struggle

*

There comes a moment when she pulls away.
You find yourself fighting the very thing
you recognize and know: that she consents
to her own going, but more, as she goes
she both consents and was forced to consent
because death has become not just the choice
but what is choosing, and is what she wants,
not "wants" but can no longer not. This death
of her resistance is the death of her.
And you are also forced this other way,
to hold her here, to keep her "secular"
against her will. You have to. You have to.
You must do what your God has asked you to:
keep her alive, but she just wants to go.

*

The worm and his killer

*

Ooo! Pierced.

"I am a worm and not a man."

So there it is.

The little worm slithered along the path that his worminess made. God looked down and loved his worm, that was taken for a given. It wasn't a path or a skeleton, or a safety net, just a given.

Sun, that ambiguous good, beat down.

The orioles chirred and whivered in the palm tree. They did not eat the worm nor did the woodpecker peck it.

There was a moment of not being pecked. Existence, the richest robe, the brightest gemstone, always a match for your birth.

The words of existence were few. You cannot have too much of it and you cannot hate it because even your hatred would be more existence. To exist is inexplicable and wonderful.

The worm slithered in the middle way. Neither fear nor confidence but the middle way. Not happy, not un-, the middle. Purposeful, drifting? Neither. Predator, prey? Neither one. Kind or mean? Not that. Boastful? Humble? Not there yet. Striving, at rest? Musical or dumb?

In the middle of the middle of the middle.

There was a little child with her foot in the air. Coming down, coming down. Gratuitous shape, death in shoes. Now does the cut worm really forgive the plow? Does it really? Does it really? Is that just what the plowman says?

The worm traveled neither in forgiveness nor unforgiveness, no, but the middle way, in between. Not afraid, not unafraid, no, not brave, not cowardly, not hopeful, not exactly. Ready? Open? Hopeful without grounds for hope? Existence too abundant to simply be boxed in this world?

The worm rested in God's hand, which was not a material object and was not subject to sun. A human foot was a thread it wove.

If you love God's work, you love all of it.

I will aim for the heart, the little child thought.

But she couldn't see the heart. It eluded her and twisted.

*

If hope was a sickness, the worm had no wish to get well.

*

Now if the child had simply walked away, she would be a person who had no story, which is like damnation, not having a story. But she stayed and looked down. The nisus had fled and the creature was in pieces. It was "dead" -- what is "dead"?

It is irreversible, right?

So she cried to see the irreversible mess beneath her foot. The yolk would not go back into its shell. It clung to her and defined her.

Tears of accountability.

Bottomless pain -- and everyone had it in some way. A person's story.

"I am a worm and not a man."

END OF PART ONE

*

In time the girl grew over the hole where she once killed a worm. It existed and hurt inside her. Her husband would laugh at her delicacies and phobias. Every corner of our house has a spider, honey. Why not get rid of just a few of them?

You would open a book in this house and a spider would leap out, a little fist of congealed ink.

Let it be.

Wherever the woman went, cats and dogs and children would materialize around her. It is odd how safe and strong a basically timid person could feel.

There was some Buddhist sage who lived in a hut filled with cobras. He didn't bother them and they didn't bother him. He was only careful where he sank his foot.

She attended a rather pokey church near the university. Her husband refused to go. Organ music from a time long ago -- that was what characterized the church. She was comfortable in her great discomfort there.

The sermons merely restated things long known from the gospels. The same ideas were shuffled around and re-voiced. She felt that this was appropriate.

The hymns used phrases that no real person ever ever ever could have said. They were not exactly God's words but certainly not the words of a human. She found some melodious sonnet rolling on her tongue.

One day a young woman wandered into the church and sat down. She was not appropriately dressed, not suitable, she looked like a flower child or really a grass child, as though she'd just gotten up from the grass. The worshippers unconsciously did that horrible thing that worshippers did: they moved away as if she were unclean. They stared at the stranger, forgetting even Leviticus. Elise -- shy as all get-out and far from either a mover or a shaker -- stood up and sat next to the stranger, took her hand. it was as soft and boneless as a worm. The girl was as fragile as a worm.

They went to lunch and shared stories but later in the day the elder woman couldn't remember a word of it -- just that the girl was Una. She was "one" then. But one of exactly what?

That evening, leafing through the paper, Elise found the girl's picture among the stories of brief wonders and accidental deaths. She didn't say anything to anyone. Scott kept his own counsel as always.

She set up a cot in the back room. Her husband raised his eyebrows -- just a millimeter or two -- and said nothing. Since that was characteristic, one didn't really know what it meant.

The old hymns rolled like wagon wheels through the old woman's head. Oh, not so old really. Perhaps neither one was altogether old.

*

Does that girl live here or not? Scott asked.

I feel there's a ghost in this house.

*

Before Elise went to bed she tried to run through some form of evening prayer. As always, she was too tired to focus. It often became a deep and debilitating nap.

Sometimes the psalms were there in the core of dream and sometimes they were absent.

As she fell asleep the book in her hands softened and morphed, it began to move slowly. It was so soft that the slightest squeeze would crush it. It had an ever-newborn feel.

She knew who she was holding. "Oh Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high." The most beautiful one submitted oneself, himself, to utter danger, even the danger of being despised. Our God had no shell, no armor.

Elise woke up shaking and in deepest devotion -- deep in the most pierced place there was. What do I do now? Where do I move from here?

What else was there to do but what you always did? The heavy woman pulled herself somehow out of the chair's suction grip. She put on what passed for a nightie then she brushed her teeth. She navigated herself to the underground region of her husband's snore. She lowered herself to bed and lay herself down.

*

The worm's soliloquy

*

Here is what I know about myself.

I am a worm and not a man.

If I do something worthy of a man, it is not me, it must have been you who have done it.


"I fell silent and did not open my mouth,*
for surely it was you that did it."


Although I have never committed a murder, my hands have this strangling thing intrinsically threaded through them. They shake with it, a worm's ghostly vertebrae. I will not deny. I will not deny. I will stop denying.

I am not -- no no -- in no way sexually attracted to children and so what terrible thing inside me impels me to insist on even saying that? Why is it necessary?

I am not different from others in feeling impelled, whenever I see something soft and vulnerable, to crush it, and this even though I myself am soft and vulnerable and essentially without defenses.

What stops me from being myself? You do, Lord.

You are restraint. You are the stopping of my native self-hoaxing. When I don't feel you elsewhere I feel you there. And this is my true vertebrae, not the other one. Insofar as you hold me back, strip me and lay me low, I love you.

Restraint is in itself a good, but I am a creature of the American 60s, the time of the worm, and so my zipper is always down, my belly and my dick exposed, everything always open and all over the place until I too am disgusted. I do not know how of myself to find measure and be measure and live within measure, to be just so. Not everywhere and everything all over the place, not standing nowhere talking on my cellphone or watching the abyss of a dancing monitor, no no no, but to be measure and to be just so. No more no less no other.

You know all this, God. Why can't i just submit to you? But in fact I know the answer.

I am a worm and not a man.

*

The worm on the cement

*

He called himself a worm but the worms called him an untouchable.

*

So what did the worm do then? He pretended to be okay. He simulated the sort of life that someone who was okay would have. He pulled himself bodily out of the darkness, the mud, the massed bed that bore our color and light. Blinking like a blindman he surfaced into the light and stretched. The world was good and he himself was perfectly normal. Right with God. Average in the sin department, neither a case of bragging nor of shame. Ha ha people said. A worm and not a man. Made an S on the cement and then a question mark. He shivered, finally revealing the truth about himself. He knew that God would have mercy on who he was, not who he pretended to be.

Feet came down solidly on the sidewalk and just missed him or else they didn't.

*

And not a worm either?

*

You - you strange boy - you call yourself "a worm and not a man" -- and yet the worms themselves want no part of you. They would prefer you call yourself something else not a worm. For they too have their worm standards of purity -- and you know you are not pure.

*

The life of a worm

*

Here theology.

I knew a worm. Let me describe a worm.

Drank. Drank too much.

The mouth of the bottle moved its lips a hypnotic serpent.

The two would kiss. Terrible taste. Pseudo love. Nirvana for Dummies.

The worm hated this relationship. In some sense even succumbing he would not succumb.

Would say: I know God means better for me.

Now the moral folk would look at him and shake their heads.

To preserve their holiness would move away and try to shut him out from -- what?

God's grace?

But what did the rich know, in effect, about God's grace? Even Protestants now thought they'd achieved their own prosperity by their own hands. Forgetting Luther they were digging themselves up by their own root.

Meanwhile the worm drank because.

Exclusion. Bad memories. Habit.

A depression that Christians claimed to be sin. Wilderness blues.

Too deep even to explore. But God was there.

Even in depression God was there.

The worm never lost his grip on God and with his worminess even had more to grip with. A grip on God's goodness. God's presence in places mere humans wouldn't go.

The worm would often say: I want to stop kissing the bottle and kiss God instead. And this is possible!

And this was even what the drinking meant.

The drinking was a fervent wish not to drink.

Imitation and perfection seemed to be out of the question. The worm could only love God and pray.

So now the question: what were God's own feelings about this worm?

*

Poem: Christianity for worms

*

So pitiably were we
unfit to meet God's terms
that we needed a Christianity
just for worms.

We had no kinship
with the saints
whose job was to sweep
us out of their tents.

We already
knew we were
unworthy
to approach the altar

so huddled
in outer
cold
unsure where

our own God was -- not was
in terms of doctrine
but for real and for us
in our desolation.

For the low and stepped on
would there be
inclusion, redemption
finally? -- or were we

tubes of hopelessness
condemned to bake
sad S's
on the sidewalk?

*

Poem: The worm in robes

*

The worm looked at the photographs. It saw
itself before it had become a worm.
Elbowy humans in their long black robes.
The sun fell like a stone. One couldn't move.

The light was like a quarry where one's limbs
lay with no possibility of shade,
no hint of shade, there never would be shade.
Light was a giant slab. It couldn't blink
or flicker or not be. Not move. Not think.

Not be a place to grow. The graduates
could only back away from where they stood
embedded in this standing -- yet our God
was there -- orthogonal to our reward,
God was the shade we would soon be dragged toward.

*

Poem: The worm and the bathtub

*

The worm sits on a bowl -- in pain, content,
both things at once. There is a theatre
confronting it -- a bathtub, white, recessed,
expectant, with a hollow to fill up.

The California shadows want to be
performers -- want to act a mystery
and not just be mysterious, as now.

A red towel hangs, a victim as it were,
and not just what a victim would have worn.
Cloth is kin to the creature dripping blood
into the bowl, the worm. A play begins,
a mystery. The tub is bare and white!

There is a stubborn doorway through its bright
recess -- both open wide and now shut tight.

*

Poem: Christianity for worms

*

The icon looked and maybe did not like
the thing "it" saw -- there was no mirror here,
there was a harrowing disconnectedness
which was no doubt the thing the icon saw.

He saw a worm, no human, just a worm
pressing its body to the filmy break
on the protected space from which one's God
looked out and not just looked, not merely looked

but reached to pull all those within his reach
those golden, beautiful, reachable ones
who "imitated Christ" -- but who were they?
And why was everyone looking away?

He pulled -- even a worm could feel the pull.
It was suffused with blood and wonderful.

*

Poem: Truth as a walk

*

What made the numbers had no number,
maker of place, the one

who lifted water like a box
and slid it under land or up in sky

then poised to fall in scintillations,
the scintillating sheets torn by the trees,

this one, the one who placed, could not be placed,
but lay and deeply lay within the waste,

a presence? could you call God that?
an absence? that was just a word

that poets used, but true words had to be
walked into, truth was more a kind of walk

that you had to *do* even to
know what you were trying to *do*.

*

Chapter 400?

*

Kierkegaard somewhere said that you cannot confront another person's ilusion head-on. You need to come from behind. What does this mean? The insight will not come out of the violence of a debate -- your respondent then just digs in and fights. You need a new arena that changes all the terms.

One is convinced by one's own experience, not someone else's. And the Spirit pushes inward from between the shoulder blades, not from outward into the eyebrows.

*

Una moved through the edge of the campus with her God behind her. He flowed into her movements as she allowed him to. Just insofar. Now God was not the thesis of an argument she had. He was not a point to be made. He was not a historical artifact to be sustained or recovered or polished or put away. Not just discussed per se, not possible. He was not a set of rules, relevant or otherwise. He was not an "experience". He was not an event in her spiritual autobiography. What he was she had to keep from blocking, she had to let him come into her perception -- into the act of her perception -- fostering it, sustaining it, keeping it from its own abject death and oblivion -- so that she might somehow be able to see the way he saw. One momentary flicker would be enough to nibble on for years and years.

She looked behind but the gardener could no longer be seen. Strongly felt but not located. Ahead of her the ruined chapel, left in decay. Crumbs and condom wrappers, graffiti on the helpless softening walls. A depression one simply needed to walk through. An ugliness that ate itself up. In the windows spiders rolled and unrolled like little yoyos.

The dorms at dawn were all in a tilted condition. They leaned like loose teeth. The light they were made of seemed a wavering substance, a flashlight in a jiggling hand. The buildings were only half plugged in -- were one to pull the plug, if you reached and pulled it, what happened to the contents, their existence? If the physical plant were turned off, what happened to the life inside? Would its being turn off too? Was it cradled elsewhere? How solidly grounded was this thing, existence? In what exactly was it grounded? Where did it come from, what was its source?

So much transience littering the soul. She felt the power behind her at an impossible angle, she felt the Lord move her forward, she rested in this immense capability. She yielded to his grandeur: Gelassenheit. Then the inexpressible joy. She walked and was walked.

Her breathing breathed her and left her breathless. "You are my refuge". Do not abandon me.

By the stairwell of the dorm, 2 students she knew slightly were lounging in their old chairs dangling coffee cups. One of them stood up to get more coffee.

Una stood next to the urn but the other didn't even look at her. Didn't see her. When she put her hand on the shoulder the woman shuddered and didn't move. They were not present to each other but rather haunted by each other.

I am invisible, Una thought.

*

Then each of the women backed away from the other as though what she'd touched had been a burning stove.

*

Photons are selfish little things whose dearest wish is to eat each other up, in the Physics that seals the land of God's abandonment. Their nature was to be overenergized and deadly. Through the sweep of them -- the concatenated physical hypotheses that popped inside the dorm staircase and made it occur -- Una moved carefully, the mud on her feet burning and cracking. Over her head the building was a construct as fragile as an untended row of trees. Sycamores say that no one loved enough to groom. She expected it to wink out of existence at any moment. She reached the floor of her own room and paused to catch her breath and pray, since even though the building felt unreal, her own prayer might still be grounded and hence a point of reference, and if so, one much needed. It would be the only surviving link between herself and this space. She opened the door and instantly her roommate rose up from her bed screaming and pointing.

You're dead! she screamed. What are you doing here? You are dead!

You have been certified already!

*

Shoulder blades

*

As Una walked, someone alighted on her shoulder blades. They folded like Origami in intricate linen, and the weight upon them only made them lighter than before. God was behind her not in front. He dug into her with his vivifying spade. "Where could I flee?"

Orthogonal to the divine is still the divine. You turn 90 degrees and something different stands in front of you. But the same one stands behind. Always there, but only now noticed.

*

The tears in the water

*

You ask about the stream and the chapel. How did they come to be? You know about the cheerleader who cried? No indeed.

She fell in love with the football star. You are the one. He told her how special she was. The girls warned her. Be independent. Don't let a man push you around.

Good rule -- but not in this case. His words were love-infused and love-informed. He meant what he said. Surely. She abandoned herself as if he were a little god. Or a big god.

An idol in shoulder pads. Blissful love like a giant stop in her ordinary life. The stop swelled like a bruise, the life disappeared. Then he grew distracted.

The team had an away game and for some reason she wasn't supposed to go. Or didn't go. Her friend convinced her to check out the locker rooms, the sanctum of the alpha males. Let's see how they live.

There in the men's room with the toilet paper lying dissheveled on the floor. Words about her on the wall, words in permanent ink. He had written the words, she recognized the hand.

Dear Lord. That man has reduced me.

Then the cheerleader began to cry. She was unable to stop crying. She squatted on the cold gray floor and cried. The tears accumulated as she cried herself away.

The tears flowed and at the same time stood still, had nowhere to go. So the standing still became this landmark, it was on the map -- and at the same time the landmark was nothing but this constant flow. Children played next to the water. The young tour guides would bring their visitors, the prospective freshmen, to the side of the stream and stand there looking out. The chapel stood next to the water. It was the cheerleader's place and at the same time stood there empty and abandoned. Abandonment was what such a girl was. It was like her attribute. But she herself had cried herself out and was no longer anywhere to be found.

*

Poem: The hook

*

The chosen one, he thrashes like a fish
upon the hook -- and the hook like a choice
one did not choose, a choice I did not wish
to have -- this choice a sheer transparency
through which the chooser, not myself,
chose my own choosing -- I have not
brought this upon myself, it was imposed.
It was thrown into me, a hook
of suffering on which my body closed.
Should I reject it, "I" becomes a word.
This I like flesh, it isn't really mine
but someone that invades me. Till my voice,
my poem has no subject of its own.
It's just a skin -- with God the flesh and bone.

*

The blade of forgiveness

*

What is the pressure between those blades? Forgiveness, it is forgiveness. Given received. The shoulders loosen and relax, they go lower, they sink down -- the shoulder blades fold and brood, a dove making ethereal gulp sounds, while the heart lifts to the sky. It is forgiveness that pushes you forward. And the will? What exactly is the will? Is it the little guy who sweeps the street in front of you so that you can move at all?

*

Imitation and Kierkegaard

*

Kierkegaard talks of true faith as "imitation" of our "prototype" Christ. But (1st but) imitation is impossible because the distance is too great! But (2nd but) recognizing this distance leads one to "grace". But (3rd but) "grace" then becomes a device for the human to go on living as before that same empty life and relying on "grace" like a crutch. But (4th but) all of this is what the human does only as facing forward and willing her redemption. But (5th but) that is not how it works, dear Mr K.

Grace is not in front of one to be willed but behind one and between the shoulder blades. It pushes the blades and so you move tentatively toward the God who is everywhere. But (6th but) doesn't the will get in the way of this? Or can you will to be pushed ever so gently by that push?

*

Behind

*

Oddly enough, your goal is not in front of you but behind you.

Behind. Under.

Like a hand.

*

The dog in God's hand

*

At the crossing, a little dog
a little dog
has 4 legs now,
has 4 legs now

looks at the girl and turns
looks back at the girl
walks to the girl
sits by the girl
wags his tail at the girl

runs away from the girl
laughing on 4 legs -- has 4 legs!
splashes in existence
swimming in the ivy like a dog swimming in the ivy.

God's hand
God's hand
my surface is God's hand

God pets the dog
God throws a bone.
God's throw. God's bone.

*

Conversion

*

At transitional points, at breaks -- where the skin turns into fingernail: that is where conversion occurs.

*

Chapter 15: Green trees

*

Una walked with the crown of her head as touching heaven, her spine straight as a thrust spear. The core lay upward and became squeezed. Her heart seemed to pierce the clouds. The book of the shoulder blades closed, tight shut. The granite dormitories stood skewed on either side, as if unable to resist the pressure of God's thumb. There was a crack down the front of the world's rational complacency and coherence, an opening of mathematical wrongness -- there for students to ponder, to fall through or ignore. It lay quietly across her forehead too. The world -- considered by itself -- did not add up. But as a kneaded paste of what was to come, it made a different kind of sense or was about to -- always on the verge, just like a human.

There was a man in the garden. Who was that man? He did his work and didn't look at her.

She was certain she knew him. She couldn't remember how. He was very attractive to her. Not knowing what to do with it, she took the attraction and shelved it like a book on some back shelf (behind the shoulder blades?), leaving it there to be latent and ready. Then she looked back and found the attraction unshelved, in front of her, bursting her heart. It had nothing to do with sex. As she stepped forward the man no longer stood in front of her, was no longer visible. But he was still there.

All around her were the green and succulent trees. As still as her own heart.

*

Poem & Digression: On loving the enemy

*

You must know what's at stake to understand
what cursing curses and who is
the enemy one must forgive but first
there has to be an enemy -- one must
live where these stakes continue to exist --
where men are wrenched in pieces and their blood
accumulates and starts to flood
all judgment. You cannot stay wrapped
in affluence like cotton. Never boast
you have no enemy or you are lost!
Faith must be founded in reality,
this little piece of it that juts out from
the wider providence you cannot know,
except as bone that breaks the way you go.

*

The shadow of God's hand

*

As she walked the mud spread and covered her -- it was a mask. One that expressed and revealed, not concealed, or one that spread its palm over untruth to conceal that and reveal the other.

God the potter spun the sharp wheel and shaped a pot or a girl. Una rolled down the hill exhilarated, hung in her cocoon of devotion. The creed was a bodily space that the body moved through. Her flesh solidified over time and flaked off. She was new.

The greatest miracle was the Crucifixion, not the Resurrection. For given an "entity" that is God, who can be surprised about its being born again from oblivion, which is merely standard behavior for a god. But that God, being who he is, would have bent forward to hollow out his own eternity and allow it to be submerged in death? Not that a given man would live forever but that God, our God, would dare to experience the other thing.

He must be crazy about us, Una said.

*

So why didn't everyone walk down her pleasant campus path, the garden walk of faith? Oh because the access was so much pain. The path was pain. So all because of pain. Or rather the fear of pain -- which is actually a form of pain.

*

The intelligent design

*

If there were a God, "how would we know?" the scientist asked. (American Scientist, Jan-Feb 2006, p, 4).

The answer might be that If I *didn't* know, then I *wouldn't* know. There is no way I "would" know unless I "did" know. In pretending the slate is bare the writer is starting from a fictional position and so will never come to the one awkward fact. It is more than pre-supposed. I would say that my "knowledge" of God was hard-wired in my being -- certainly deeper than a postulate. Whatever in me knows would come from this, or this would be what knew, or what did the knowing. You can't exactly dispute about a wiring nor can you, the wire, redo the wire. Nor prove, nor disprove. This is deeper territory than the flat hall of debate, unless you imagine a debate that you ride inside like a wild train and come out as a being changed and disclosed, maybe killed. That would not be very scientific.

*

The landscape

*

Had the landscape then been evil? She could not see it that way. Even the bugs being eaten were not in themselves suffering evil. Death was not an evil, it was something that occurred. Death gave life its shape.

Where then did evil come from, since it was so swarmingly there? Was the devil -- who was not a real entity on his own but more like a virus that could seize a distracted will and simulate existence -- so was his whole existence nothing but your own loss of focus?

*

Suppose that suffering were something external that the will encountered as an object. Its final meaning might be what the will made of it. It might be like a weight whose lifting made you stronger. That was what it was as an object, not a subject. Why didn't it stay that way?

*

Through some terrible metamorphosis, no, it was a literal invasion and a passing through the membrance, suffering became subject instead of object, it became you. The person suffering the pain became the pain. all sentience about anything became pain's mentation, a damned entity to be sure. There was evil. There was damage. You might say that when this happened, even the devil now had hands and feet of his own to flex. But how did it happen?

*

Was it about focus? Did it happen because a human, knowing it had a goal, took its eyes off the goal?

*

Was it about the periphery being allowed to seep in and take control?

*

Was it when the creature, already full, felt its own fangs being sunk into food that it didn't even want? Then food rose into consciousness and began its ugly sobbing. And the sobbing was waste and about waste. Something now gone off track.

*

The mud

*

What was the mud? The mud was penance. The mud was made of penance, soul-building pain.

Her body was softer than a worm's, more vulnerable. She fell through this putty-like water and felt it reshape her. That was yieldedness. It was terrifying. An ana-baptism!

The process: you yielded to God (a yielding like death), you felt God knead you, and you then resurfaced into the world but it was now a different world. The world you left was a godless one, the world you re-entered was God's world. Here you were in no way alone.

And the filth made no difference.

And it didn't matter now how frail and damageable your own being was. You no longer brooded on that. God was in control.

And in that thought you submerged and were kneaded once again.

*

Chapter 13: The invertebrate

*

So Una gave herself to God to be kneaded -- a worm within the mud. The walls of the body were just about nothing -- they were liquid or putty. They were ready -- to be shaped into anything.

She fell off an invisible cliff without any purchase at all. The risk of death -- well, it was more than a risk. Was this nothing but the force of gravity? Was God really there?

As for gravity, that too was no more than a shape that God shaped.

All of the elements dissassembled and gave themselves to God.

I hate a world where all the creatures eat each other, she cried. But the cry, that was eaten too.

And the falling continued to fall. She felt her being continue to pull into pieces, softish ones. A poor shell-less invertebrate, what could it do but expose its own weakness in utter hope?

*

Food

*

Darwinian pit, abandoned by God but perhaps not by his son. They say that Jesus recognized that food had become the subject (subject not object) within our wicked hearts and that blood was tickling our souls with lust -- a forbidden engorging -- and so he came, broke into our vile fratty games and put his own breast in the path of the fang -- "I am the bread of life" -- so that through his own and voluntary breaking-open, food could be clean once again.

*

Feeding

*

A terrible truth about Darwin's land. When the ants there fed on a scorpion, and ingested her alive, it was not her stinger, her poison or her carapace that they relished, it was her resistance, that was what they fed on and what tasted so good to them.

*

Chapter 11: Una's encounter

*

They said that every encounter with God ran the risk of death. That was why so many even who called themselves religious shunned that encounter.

Are you orthodox? Are you orthodox? How can you be alone in the mud?

To most it seemed better to live in echoes of the encounter and to retell the old stories that concerned it, simply as stories. Good things to share with our children, they said. History, art, politics, anything but truth.

When a story ended it was like a curtain coming down on a play. Everyone stood up and went home. But an encounter was different from a story.

The people had curled themselves into a ball and hung immersed in the stream that burst the mud. A tadpole sewed through and pierced their sphere, and a demon looked down from a leaf overhead. Behind another leaf Una now hid. She was frightened of this world. Oh Darwinism is the land of God's abandonment. Now there was a membrane separating Una's realm from that land -- one quick movement would make it tear.

So she was smart enough to be afraid.

The creatures in the sphere made a village, a community. We are one, we are close. But some of them were tied and hung upside down. Others slithered along the bloodshot surface. They would nip each other and chew slowly. Sometimes a carapace would suddenly implode. Love was predation in Darwin's land. There was a pair of people each of whom was busy eating the other's haunch. They reached their extensors into each other's belly, pulling out pieces of meat.

It's all just natural, someone said, a budding ethicist, or a demon probably. It's just the way things are. Nothing beyond this. Accept it.

On the bank a group of peasants in yellow pajamas engaged in a tug of war but the thing being tugged was themselves and the flesh would be pulled back and forth until you couldn't recognize it. One of them grabbed her wrist to pull her into the healthful game.

She was now terrified enough to risk the encounter with God. The risk of instant death, that was why more people didn't do this. The kneading of your heart in God's hand, the potting that might kill you.

Conduct, sullen and inexpressive boy, held her other hand as if to encourage her -- or to keep her from running away.

*

Surveying the landscape

*

As she walked the devil hovered and became *there*. The Place of Poetry was one of his special lairs -- he loved to break in and tear it down. The tears of humans were a precious food. Were he but the bodily trappings of a disordered will, so be it. He revelled in a destitute existence, unlike any modern Christian. So the devil perched, between the bladder and the bowels, holding on tightly and flapping his horrible wings. Inside the body deeply.

A beetle crawled across his face in the mud, with a chemical sting at its nether opening, and the sting was slipping and sliding like a hose filled with poison. The devil grabbed the bug and wedged it into the mud, embedding the sting. Then he contentedly ate the front half still alive. Una walked through the slush without even looking back, actually she was praying her head off, and the devil not only got left behind but was miniaturized, diminished to a mote.

God lay ahead

*

In the sludge

*

I want to be good, she said, don't know how. The others reduce me, the others, my equals. Gravitational force of human stuckness, the sludge of dailiness. That sludge of dailiness itself grows daily. I pull away and then seem alone -- want to pull away but not be alone. Conduct -- the man she loved -- pulled away from her. His nature. Standing on the cliff above the gully, not a cliff, just a discontinuity. Because life is ringed by death and death is ringed by God -- and you want to move through it.

Don't hang on me, the man said. Don't be one of those girls you see at convenience stores, leaning on their man pathetically. Little Tammy, sweet Diane. The guy smokes her like a cigarette. She looks like someone who's given herself away -- entregada -- to nothing but a human! Treating a human as godlike -- godlike powers. But he too is distorted and weak. That guy is no god.

Your conduct has to be your own.

But here at college, the girls were having sex with the boys and didn't even want to. Didn't even want what they seemed to want. Didn't even know what they want. Sluggish like those not dead not alive. Sluggish being. Pull out pull away. And not be alone there. You are not alone.

If you are not alone, who are you with? God be with me even in this mud.

*

She tripped and fell...

*

into the water, yes, but he was there with her, the intentional one whose remoteness was a form of love.

She reached for the mud of the stream-edge and seemed to close her fingers upon a grub, too soft for a human hand.

She remembered the day she'd fasted to the point of exhaustion and fallen praying onto the vision of a grub. Some creature so thin it not only didn't have a shell but didn't have any protection at all. So that even touching it seemed to hurt it. And permanently. How could things so weak be thrust into the world, things born to die, how could God allow their life as nothing but carnage? Yes but inwardly this vulnerable image had been Jesus himself, the one who had opted to be without defenses, though the most powerful being in the world, gaping with softness, inexplicable. Sheer threads of hurting hanging down. Now remembering this image, she grabbed onto the poor creature and squeezed it with a practiced selfishness.

... was pulled back onto the shore. Where all the dead bugs lay. The losers in the battles, resting and decomposing.

*

Chapter 8: The fear

*

In the wheeling fields of storage and memory behind the campus, there was a complete forest at play. At prayer, at play. Free space between. All of it a form of memory. Of past and present and future. More comprehensive than mere time.

This was the domain of the One whom it was perilous to describe and at the same time imperative to try to try to try to understand. And then speak His name. Did God walk the earth or was the entire earth like a single footstep of God? To walk in wonder the playspace or prayerspace and then let its wind blow you through.

You don't know where it came from. You don't know where it's going. It fills your consciousness and rises.

There were large segments of protected space with trees pushing through it. All of it to be read only -- now listen, be quiet, ponder what you move through.

She wondered if a word could listen and not just pontificate. If a sentence could be filled with openness and questioning instead of this pressing demand to expound and to "know".

Then the wind reached and lifted her for a second, "bodily", over the threshhold of the muddy path that fenced off the cliff and led to the rushing water overhead, no: it was down below. A rushing sound that came from every direction.

What a magnificent fear this was!

*

The breath

*

So she let the breath breathe her.

Her own role small. The breath initiated. From where? To where?

Where are you? Who are you?

Twigs that shifted, dry brush breathing. As if sinking after exercise. Wind like a billowing towel. Can you talk? If you can talk, you are still within range. So go further? She sank down into recovery, let go. The thoughts between the thoughts were almost within grasp.

In the forest Una reached forward her hand and then a hand grasped her hand. Who are you?

Fear a great teacher. One's eyes wide like a horse's. Looking back, there are dorm windows, golden, swollen, people inside. Many miles away. Existent, remote.

But out here, the between that surrounded things was like a leaven. The place was growing.

The breathing was not hers.

What did she bring back? Not information, nothing but wonder.

*

The wood of New Year

*

New Year's Day. She stepped into the woods behind the dorm. No one there, no color beside wet black and softest white. Black of trees and thorns, very heavy the way it dipped. Moisture within and without.

Be with me there.

Between each thought the same substance as between each twig. Between the branches of the trees there stretched a "there" that was not space but something deeper and perhaps more frightening: the possibility of space. The fact of a space, the opening that as if condescendingly allowed space to be there.

The poetry of the place was the place itself. No, the place was a decal and beneath it what the mere shell of the colors covered.

Be with me there.

In the New Year and at any other time.

*

The foot on Christmas day

*

And so the yoga instructor held a class on Christmas day and the atmosphere was very strange. A special day, yes, but in what way exactly? Everything shut down and everyone withdrawn into a familial warmth, except for those without family. For them, all strange.

Was there joy? Merely strangeness?

The teacher went through a sun salutation but there was no sun anywhere. Then she stretched what would not stretch.

Do not force the muscle, treat it like a gentle beast -- it resists when you push hard but there is always a way to coax.

But first of course you must coax the thing that coaxes -- that is the will, the coaxer. It too resists prodding but responds to persuasion. An exasperating donkey of an organ. You must not push past without respect.

Bend the knee and, if you can, lift the foot. Lift it rather high and hold it in your arms, rock back and forth. Hold it with both hands.

Hold it like a baby. You are like a mother, holding this thing, this self, in loving arms, and rocking it with infinite tenderness. Not the self but something closer than the self. Try to love what you have.

So the day rocked within an enormous tenderness that no one quite understood. And you were its child.

*

Kenosis

*

She walked into the path, the Place, and found herself empty, even deliberately emptied herself. It was called for. It was necessary. "Depression", whatever that was, had to be a valley one walked through and finally left behind. So the emptiness was like an exhalation, making space for the joy that one would soon inhale. It took a kind of courage.

As for "Depression" (whatever that really was!) did you medicate it? Of course you medicated it, if you had to, if the alternative was a collapse into death. But there would always remain the concern that this painful kneading you walked into was not something to deflect but something to walk through -- that medication might be an evasion of a truth that needed instead to be faced.

There was an odd truth inside the atrocious pun of your "equal" relationship with God: "I need God -- and God kneads me".

*

Lord Kelvin's casino

*

Life is like a casino (I say -- pretending to be some big expert on this -- never having gambled in my entire life -- but understanding it the way an obedient priest understands sex). The kids in the casino are playing a losing game, because the percentages are set at 51% for "the house", so if you play long enough, there is no uncertainty to this: you will lose. But all the players think they are exceptions somehow and maybe manage to be, for awhile.

But if you continue to play you are going to lose. What you most like about your body, or your mind, or your circumstances, that is what you are certain to lose -- the better it is the bigger the loss.

And when the casino closes for the night, all the takings are gathered -- where?

What is this "house" that always wins? Not God, nothing to do with God. Whoever runs the house, that person too is also playing, and also guaranteed to lose. So the game makes no sense and something else entirely has to be operating.

You could create an indirect proof for the existence of miracles by proving how exhausted, empty and non-existent is the alternative world, the one where people play against the "house" and lose.

The "house" is where people go who are turning away from God. So of course one loses there!

*

In Lord Kelvin's Casino, everybody play the laws of thermodynamics and everybody loses. The players lose, the house loses, the owners lose, even people who are just looking on, they also lose. So don't play that game. Maybe you walk through a space where those laws reign but you don't have to live there -- living by definition takes place where there is the possibility of life -- in a casino there is none. Life is elsewhere, in a garden of faith, where abundance somehow knows how to bloom itself even out of destitution. And there, everybody wins.

*

Through death?

*

Christianity is in essence to move through death into life. Well, I've got the death part down. I have memorized death. I know this immersion. Death is clear. What I need to learn is that next movement. This is hard.

Death has got me down. But if you stop there everything before it also dies. Move on, it is imperative to move on.

*

Dear Christian, imagine...

*

Dear Christian, imagine what it would be like to really *be* a Christian. You yourself are not yet a Christian, though you believe you are....

*

Chapter 6: Conduct imagined as a person

*

There is a person -- to be described as a person, maybe in a thought experiment -- a person whose face and race are masked. Even his (his?) identity is masked. For that matter, his existence is masked, not so much by pleasure, masked rather by the daily round of calisthenics -- of chores -- that one calls one's goals, that long checklist that shapes one's day in chunks of discontinuity, until the phone rings and even this minimal movement forward is blocked, stopped in its tracks. The daily round. All right, there is a person masked behind all that.

Who is this person? He is a healer, a helper, a great spiritual guide, perhaps a warrior but definitely a sage.

His gift is altogether available. His gift to a given mortal consists of pain, discomfort, a lack of ease and a sense of discouragement, a healing sense of personal brokenness. All right, pain, a lack of ease, that is what he gives you, but it's a healing lack of ease in a world like this where such a thing as true ease can not be lightly bought nor sold.

For those people, and they are millions, who have lost the feel for what they are living and doing -- for those who have lost the spirit of the Place -- this person steps forward and offers, well, what exactly? What does he offer? A way to move safely through the negation that is that missing feel. A way to move back into feeling -- or if it isn't back, maybe it's really moving forward, maybe this motion is something entirely new, and so it is a gift, this throbbing. This person leads you into a sense of rightness that feeds a mortal and keeps her alive. It is a rightness that is appliqué, applied from the outside, but still not an intrusive thing, because the pain is you and yours. This generous masked person, this mysterious guy, knows how to keep a mortal alive. He holds the world's why safely in his closed hand. You cannot exactly see it, perhaps you can't even feel it, you definitely cannot say you know it. You only know of it but that's enough. You are left with the sense that this mysterious austere person, who cannot be embraced and flattered, can at least be trusted. Feeling nothing else, you do at least feel that. So you follow him, you follow this masked one, you commit to "entregar", to abandon, because you have retained this minimal essential thing, the sense that the person can be trusted.

Give him the drabbest name you know. Call him conduct. He is like Christ's angel, he actually wishes the best for you. He may offer pain but he offers no fear. "Do not fear". He places your hand within his own perhaps drab and clammy hand. You are not comfortalbe there and you shift there most awkwardly. You move through your grim day, not knowing why you do anything you do. Depressed. Your knowledge is withered and your heart is just a stone. Your soul has hibernated, your eyes are too dead for tears. Yes, but your hand is held.

You persist in trusting the hand that is pulling your hand.

*

Like rain like drought

*

Grace like rain, it falls like rain. But is sometimes disguised as drought. Very very effectively disguised. Very very oh so dry now.

*

Still must be grace, even so. Only this drymouth feels like reading Oswald Chambers every morning, leaves you feeling hopeless by comparison to real Christians (where are they now?), you seem to be an F-student in sanctification. Hopeless? Or is that emotion merely a ladder to the floor above, which is itself hope and not just hope but grounded hope? And suddenly your mouth floods with words.

But she cared about what it really was, not how it felt.

*

The holy drought

*

Have you ever shucked off all caution and stood outside in the drought, as that girl did, and let it fall down, fall on top of you? To stand in the drought, feel it fall down, let it cover you and soak you till your clothes are heavy and your shoes make an unhappy squishing sound. In the drought, penetrated by the drought, feeling it fall and accepting it as a gift.

As one of the things God has given. A dryness that is not dry at all.

She walked through it steadily, not pretending it wasn't there, but not seeing it as ultimate either. Drought has a fruit of its own, drought has (I hope it has) a purpose, a measure that measures a kind of abundance, also a direction, a slant, a way of cleaning you off as it moves through. So say it, thank you for this dryness, thank you for the emptiness and the hunger and even for this dull feeling inside me that doesn't want to thank you at all, that feels a bit like dying, even thinks it is already dead, there is even a submerged and sullen thankfulness hidden inside that, waiting to be savored.

And the drought came on coming down. Month after month after month. The path to the garden covered with dust.

*

God's fire

*

The world? Are the atheist and the Christian both correct about it? "One world, after all"? The bend, the shape of it is the same bend and the same shape for both people -- if it is different the difference still bends the same way and ends up with the same shape -- so both believer and non- somehow manage to live there and be right about where they live. But is that true?

Imagine God as a fire. Then imagine there being both a closeness and a distance from that fire. The place might even be chosen. Chosen by you. Chosen for you. Or just chosen without more ado. The world in its peculiar bend and shape. A shape that either someone shaped intentionally to look as if randomly shaped (and that random look is correct) or else that something shaped randomly in such as way that the shape seems intentional (and in fact it is). And the place is cohabited by people who believe in the shape and people who do not or cannot believe in it, that is, as a shape. As shaped. The world, the "case", about which one is somehow correct.

And the disbeliever and the believer are often, in effect, a single person.

So you are close to the fire -- a believer -- or distant from it -- and as if condemned not to believe. The same world. Only the placement changes.

The same events, the same kind of events, happen close and happen far: death, as one example. But the meaning differs. Burning with intention? Not so? A different event, burning or not burning with intention. But the same world. The burning at least is for real.

It seems that the atheist's beloved Darwinism (clung to like a faith) is indeed true but just distantly true, a sort of abandoned truth most true to that category of truth tellers that is identified or self-identified as the abandoned. To them it's not just true but truer than true, this bloodsport of being is like a dye that saturates all truth and makes it true. The ancient emperors believed in it too in the deepest way. This is the truth that bites and sucks its believers but of course that doesn't make it anything but true in the place where it is true -- in the remoteness from God's fire.

But when you try to understand even this Darwinian truth, and God's place (even posited as remote) within this truth, you find yourself moving closer to the fire, God's fire, and it is as though you have no choice. The fire burns with love for you, with your own love. Even for you. The moment you approach it, that other truth is no longer true and indeed somehow never was. That is, the fact thaat it never was true somehow becomes true (though wasn't before) but this movement of truth is all in you, not in the truth itself, and certainly not in the world.

So that what ends up mattering is not what truth you have reasoned out or into with so much labor. What matters is where you are. Close to the fire? Far away from the fire? Not very sure?

Are you burning yet?

Think of not what you think but where. God will burn all our reasonings.

*

Crackle

*

Because made. The world, the whole thing. Not just there. "There" is a word excavated and occupied. Occupied by. Billion dollar prepositional phrase, quest of lifetime: "by". By whom? To know the whom all the way. Lifetime task. Lift a rock, never find nothing. Because made. What would nothing be? A counter for computations?

Finish the "by". Digging your heart for treasure.

Even nothing has something inside.

No that's not right. Not something. Someone.

The difference between "thing" and "one"? Finish the "by", would you please. Tried and tried. Even the being at a loss, even that is movement forward. A quest, no?

Every second a package to be unwrapped. In fear. Might explode. Crackling paper. Fear.

It kneads you. No stopping. When stopping stops it goes on. A dryness folded into the water. All right.

Made. Made by. Finish the by.

She herself was the package.

Afraid to open. Easier, just clutch it and hold on. Suspension, abeyance. All that sad vocabulary of not yet.

Cowardice is understandable. But that is not what I wanted to understand.

Syntax, that would sustain your thinking but not change it. Not the virtual particle flitting that you like to be. Not committing, never committing.

No one was ready really.

The freedom of not being anyone, that was what people wanted. People themselves wished not to be occupied. Instead of excavating. The occupation was not you but another. It might require something.

To pregnancy, they brought a scalpel. The horror of being someone, having a history. A syntax.

Better to just fly?

The students walked over not upon the campus. The sidewalk. There were sad nymphs leaning half in half out of the trees. The students didn't see them. Poetry now nothing but Poundian flotsam. Frags of self delight. Rap in a workshop. Fun to write, painful to read.

Well, God spoke in days and weeks, not just individual words. You had to wait. Even the moment of true waiting, that too you had to wait for.

*

Because made. The whole thing. Not just there, really.

*

Conversion

*

One Sunday she walked into a church. She opened the door and the building swallowed her. Then she returned the next Sunday to the dark eaves and the glass pictures. She "was never seen again". She died to the bulk of her friends. She walked the labyrinth and got her feet tangled in the thread of a turn, was never able to extricate herself, she unravelled as she moved. Converted. Converted. Unable simply to leave. Stuck listening to an organ whose reverberations never died. Exchanged the peace with strangers. Felt that peace.

*

Recited the creed. Didn't blink, didn't clutch, didn't clear her throat. Didn't hold back. Took the miracles in stride. In stride. Darling, there they are. Deal with them. Believe. She didn't fan herself with old syllogisms. Didn't play the game of being too adult to commit herself. Didn't fetishize the game of disobey. Actually didn't play the age old games. Walked the rolling green of the great lawn. Labyrinths of larches. If not the garden she grew up in, at least a snapshot.

Sang when asked to sing. Got down on those sharp knees. Didn't play the role of confessing, no. Confessed. Actually did it. Refused to look around and judge. Managed not to project her own weakness into the crowd. Loved her enemies, admitted she had them. Handed her hatred to God without pretending not to have any. Skipped the step of hating God. Helped an old lady to the altar. Took bread and resolutely chewed. Did not bother to cover her mouth.

*

Church is a building you enter but don't leave. If you leave, you didn't enter, because entering is the act of not leaving. Its walls smear your skin like honey or chocolate. They leave a mark, a permanent mark. You are there. You can't rub it off you nor you off it. You are there and are never not there, not anymore. You walk in. You don't walk out. Church.

This is not real estate but God's fleshy hand squeezing.

*

The heavy, hard, perhaps mean-spirited people walking to the altar. They are desperate to change. The desperation is real and the change is what is hoped for. This is church, you are in church. Forever. Have a good day!

*

God spoke...

*

... in days, not in sentences

*

How poetry killed

*

When she sat under a tree God took the tree and threw it at her. The leaves became spears, the trunk made a passageway. Ants and spiders thrashed within pockets. Her meditation pierced so that she could not move. One's body wallowed in a Shelleyan blood. What is good pain? Might this be good pain? Pain from God -- not from a man -- would be good pain, bountiful pain, a throbbing that you lick in your subjection to what is real. A pleasure thrown forward from this Place, which is the throw.

So if words spoken in this Place should kill you, might that not be good? Would they not still be good words? The good not in the words but behind the words. Godly words.

It must be the case that poetry "can kill a man", as a certain person said. Poor "corazon" now sits chained and afraid, biting the air around it. The girl could barely clear her head to study, she could barely breathe.

If this was absence, what in the world could presence be?

*

The veil

*

The logicians merely killed time, discussing the gray and dirty veil that dangled over reality but not saying the one necessary thing, that it *was* a veil, that it hid the subject matter they wanted to discuss. And the veil examined closely was their own words.

When she stopped discussing with them she went and sat in the Place -- movable, withdrawn -- that harbored the text from the past. The past always knew more. Scripture there did not enter the logical game and did not even refuse to play. The Scripture and the Place were two overlapping circles.

In that Place the experience of reading was to let God hook words onto His bow and shoot them straight through a given sentence, no longer veiled. Words were vertical not horizontal, and they would enter the heart with great pain, a flourishing of bloody feathers that was not a discussion. Reading them turned into living and not mere talking.

It was so difficult to speak of what one lay inside.

*

Chapter 5: A room without windows

*

Imagine a room without windows, a room without doors. How did you get in, how will you get out? That's not the pont. You are imagining. Imagination flows through walls, goes everywhere, especially impossible places. So imagine you're there. Locked within those walls. Nothing but walls.

It is a place without a feel. It is a place without poetry. It is a place in which to focus. A box, an empty box? No, so far from empty. Even a vacuum swirls with virtual particles. There is quite a lot here.

Here you do not leave the world but focus on the world without interruption. It is a box of bliss.

What is here? Existence is here. Existence fills the room to overflowing. It kneads you without ceasing. "It"? Can anything that moves you so merely be "it"?

There is a place where greed and anxiety are, if not extinguished, not quite that, at least put away in a drawer. Put away for now. The drawer is closed -- so closed that it essentially disappears. It is a room without furniture and you sit inside its blue. The air is blue. Birdsong sweeps the air a little bit. A sense of birdsong without birds. Perhaps the swish of passing cars. They seem to erase themselves.

The blue is not placed there, the blue is not appliqué. It seems to emanate from what is there. Existence cannot be put in a drawer, existence always comes to swell and increase. The folds of this place's garment are blue. Now the blue takes on a deeper blue. The pine needles pierce it slightly.

The room is rare and wonderful. And it *has* no walls!

*

The place of being - Chap 4: The damped feel

*

The forest was God's ear, God's mouth and God's garment. "Take your hand from the folds of your garment" (Ps 75.11, NIV?). In other words, make actual what you have implied. Speak to me!

The feel was damped and distant. She could not feel the Place but only be there. But to a person with the longing that kneaded her now, even the feel of no feel became a powerful force, poignant and full of emotion. Silence took the mask off what sound had only played at. It was as though her longing were the object of what she longed for, looping back into her, refracted. And destitution -- the soul's dark night, poetic, dangerous, ever so alluring -- offered an odd kind of solace, an unexpected rest. Sadness was a pleasure (if it could ever be such a thing) that came into her very much subdued and very much delayed. And even her walking through it waited for it.

*

The place of being - Chap 3: Depression

*

One m0rning the girl woke up and the Place was gone. It couldn't really have been gone but the feel of it was gone. The world persisted and classes occurred, even classes in poetry, but the subject matter, or again the feel of the subject, had fled. The thing talked about was not to be known. And she walked the wooded area adjacent to the campus and felt herself bereaved again. Something had been taken away, although it still was there.

Her life continued, her grades were good, her friends thought of her as happy. Her professor saw great promise in her as he followed her with his eyes.

On the path to the creek, the elite girls stood and complained. This place has grown common, they said. People have invaded this place who don't *understand* it. It isn't the way it was before. Nothing is as before.

What has poetry stooped to become? A bunch of nobodies taking the mike for their own and reciting their hip-hop *jingles*.

Mere therapy. Poetry has lost its outward motive.

We were seeking grace and clarity. A world whose lines were pure. Comprehension circulating lucidly in motes of light.

The rich girls complained with a sing-song lilt, making the poetry of regret with their mouths. But no one wanted to hear it. They were the evicted nymphs of the Place. Their soft membranes were tearing in this new harsh air. Poetry is weak, poetry is dying. It cannot survive the bustle of the world.

The girl stood beneath the bleak buckeyes and wondered whether the feel would ever return, the feel that expressed the world. God's beautiful world with its soft colors and torn hornsounds, its flute-thin outlines shivering like thistle fluff, the undersurface of a world not meant to be simply used but to be -- what? What exactly was this world for? What was the mission of this place that was more than a place, this haunted domain with its surrounding echo, its abiding sense of purpose, its providential push? Reality rhymed and rhymed. There was someone intending and someone hearing -- someone objective but not human -- someone standing in the place waiting for her, this was the deity she was unable to engage. The Place of Poetry was like a place of assignation, she had had an appointment there with God and had missed the appointment, now nothing to do but wait and wait. What else could be the purpose of this *place* with her in its middle?

*

Forgiveness as being: The shop of bones

*

Bread is a clothing that coats the bone. "Give us... our daily bread."

*

But bone is a clothing too. (What exactly does it clothe?)

*

The Place of Poetry was a clothing store where the bones went to put on their clothes. But the bones themselves were a clothing that was put on and someday taken off. What did the bones clothe?

What they clothed, that was what you saw milling around the shop (or desperately queueing in a Russian breadline), hovering if it had the power to hover. Hovering and waiting for bone. This inner "thing", this "what they clothed" was something desperate for a metaphor, something that cried out to be clothed in metaphor, so that it could actually *be*.

Because being, too, that was something external that a creature put on.

*

Forgiveness: Parable of the Coat

*

When I wear my little coat -- the one of which I've spoken dear -- I feel lighter by ever so much. Lighter by the weight of the coat. when I wear my coat my own self-hatred becomes a non-issue. Not that it disappears darling. Not that it completely disappears but it is perhaps folded and put aside. Let us put a parenthesis around that -- let us just bracket that one and leave it undealt with for awhile! That is what I do with those particular concerns. It is as though the coat becomes a mask over my sorrow, only here darling the mask is truer, more authentically worn, so to speak, than what it covers, and so I no longer know really what it covers. I am in the dark because the mask is not a disguise. My relief from the self-hatred is actually truer than the self-hatred. The form is true, the formlessness it covers is, not exactly untrue, of course, but a lesser truth, a true less true, a sad half-truth that would lead (if it existed) into the evasions and lies of a typical inauthentic person being authentic. And thus cannot really be true. How can something that moves inevitably into lies itself be true? I'll have none of that.

Well leave that thought floating without a registry, let it die. In this case, my coat covers my shabbiness with the truth of my forgiveness, that is, my simultaneously being forgiven and forgiving. I think I can love that if I can't love myself.

So I wear my little coat and feel okay going into strange rooms, mingling with stranger, and that is someting new, I can tell you. There is a buffer now between myself and whatever is strange, including myself, the strangest of all. So now how I feel in that room is as underfined as ever but the feelings that buffer me and that I wear can be predicted. So they form a protection.

The coat will neither harm nor be harmed. So if I can just wear it my dear, I will be okay. And I do intend to do that.

So I wear it as often and awkwardly as possible and I am quite happy to sweat inside it, as long as it is there.

It is you might say my creator's coat; and even when I put it on, even then, he himself did not previously take it off.

So who is really wearing it, I don't know. Nor do I exactly care. In my current dissheveled state, I only care that the coat is there, I don't care who owns it. What a waste of time such a question would be! I don't care who puts it on as long as I'm wearing it. I don't care if the wearing is mine to brag about. Wear it and shut up, I tell myself. Stretch it where it goes. And I am sure there are people wearing it right now who don't even know that it exists, and covers them, and they also don't realize whose it is.

*

Poem of Forgiveness

*

Forgiveness is like the yellow suddenness
inside green leaves, not placed on top
but inside, welling out from the core
of that distant tree, a substance not
an attribute, not hanging like some ornament,
more truly what the live tree hangs upon,
available yet hidden, a primary
color so easily blended in the soot
of my own evaluations: "that tree
is blocking the sun from me".
I wish I could hold what it contains, I would like
this brightness to cover me, no not cover me
but issue from me -- so that I might be
forgiven, as the leaves are, effortlessly.

*

Interlude on forgiveness

*

FORGIVENESS AS CLOTHES

Forgiveness wasn't something she had but someting she put on, a sort of invisible coat that altered the current of the air in both directions. What seemed magical could be seen as everyday and recognized as reality, after all. It was not a transaction, not part of a trnasaction: "forgive and you'll be forgiven". Rather the 2 were a single act, they happened as one or did not happen. If you could feel it coming in, you could let it go out as well. That was because it wasn't you, wasn't yours. It was something beyond the human auriole, a golden plasma on which the human fed. She tried to wear it like a coat. The hard part really was to forgive yourself, to let it go, to entrust.

*

Forgiveness was the kind of clothing that you could not take off. It was a clothing that you wore communally. It was the natural thing to have on. Natural, actually rather bizarre and awkward. Always in the style of no style. It was so always right, so profoundly right, that it had even made its truce with fashion, long ago, as no other clothing ever had: forgiveness was out of fashion the year it was introduced, out of fashion the following year, out of fashion now, and had never for a single moment, even by accident, been in fashion. Its transcendence had been to be despised always. It fit awkwardly onto every size. And yet there were always people who, as if unable to control themselves, had felt moved to put it on, take it on. Without these people the world would probably have run down long ago. Though you never saw them on runways or in magazines, that was ever so okay with them, they were altogether fine with that, my love. Or if not fine, for God's sake, the thing was simply to forgive and move on. Wearing beautiful clothes.

*

NAKEDNESS

Forgiveness is a coat that leaves you more naked. Well, at least as yourself. It's not really your coat that you've put on, to be sure. The one that actually owns the coat, that one has never worried about such a petty thing as hiding His nakedness. So the coat doesn't do that, doesn't bother. Au contraire, as the Irishman said. Amd now all your belongings are on show, and, my my, how basically little you are. Better not take the coat off, you bottom, you yawning bowel. Because the coat has taken away all your pride. You are nothing now but your own acceptance of the needy thing you are.

*

DIRT OF FORGIVENESS

There are a lot of people walking around wearing the coat of forgiveness now. Some of them sincere, some maybe not, but that (you are forced to say) no longer matters, for a reason to be made clear in a moment, but not now. The people's intention in a way doesn't matter, what matters is simply that they have put the coat on.

These people do not pray the "angry" psalms. They rush through the "angry" psalms as fast as they can, hoping the building will not fall on them till they get past it. That rushing is a thing to be forgiven.

Now this whole forgiveness thing the people have is a crass transactino. The people in the coat are probably trying to scam God, of all lunatic things to do. They are trying to hide themselves in forgiveness, even though forgiveness makes them naked. It makes them look ugly and that too is a device they use to make God look away, not look too closely at them. We are wearing our forgiveness, God, we would like not to be tested anymore. Leave us alone, turn your glance away. We want to pass the test just as we are. Just for showing up in these corny, awkward, unfashionable clothes, we deserve to pass. The people think all this nonsense, and then they look around and see all the scammers in the room with them, people who are using God instead of loving God. So many losers wearing or trying to wear the coat, for the shallowest reason. Phonies. Liars. But these are words the people do not use, these words are not allowed. Not only not to be spoken but definitely never to be thought. Because --

Because we want to be forgiven. And the price (since we have introduced price into this relation), the price is that we can't use judgment to sweep our dirt away. The bargain is that we must remain dirty and let dirt be our cleanliness. And we are obligated to turn a loving eye, a kindly eye, on our neighbor's dirt. In fact, when I put the coat on, my neighbor is the one I put it on.

*

Poem: Epigram on form

*

The form of things was such that even it
was formed, had form, would gesture like a hand
and make some curve, and the curve curved, and that
was more real than what the form curved around.
Redemptive of what happened was this way
it happened. Stuff broke down. Its form would stay.

*

The place of being - Chap 2: Poetry as a place

*

There was once an upper class girl who went to a good college and felt she lost her religious faith there -- not that she really *could* lose something so intrinsic to her -- something whose whole essence was the not getting lost -- but in any case she'd lost the ability to express it clearly and fearlessly within this skeptical milieu enfolding her and she'd lost the courage to brave the ridicule that would have fallen on her for having what people insisted could no longer be had. Not in this lucid, fluorescent-lit world of ours. Not in a world lit like a drugstore. She'd lost the public face of faith. So it went into hiding and yet somehow became stronger for the tribulation it was passing through, and it waited for the day when it could break out again and be jubilant and noisy, like all strong things. That would be a different story. Meanwhile the girl read poetry by the hour, a candle-burnt substitute, a sort of secret link to what she still sensed but could no longer share.

She majored in poetry if that were possible.

That is, poetry became the place she lived. Or, to turn the trope around, she discovered poetry as a place -- discovered that the true nature of poetry was to be a place. The words for this broke open like bubbles.

So poetry was not a book? Poetry was no longer a book?

It was not a series of lines bright with images, repeated stresses, musical rhymes? Not an incantation with its sound accidentally sawing something open or slamming down the lid of an inward box?

Wasn't poetry a column of fat expressive lines on a page? No indeed. Poetry had become a place. It was better described by a cartographer after a rich dinner than by a linguist whose own skills of wielding a language might be depressingly bare and exposed. Because nothing here was exposed. Everything was hidden. The linguist stood outside the magic circle, the linguist watched a game whose prime rule was to elude him, even became intent on eluding him, designed expressly to baffle him. Poetry was a place. It had an entrance, it had sides. It needed to be walked before you could understand the grounds for its existence, if indeed there were grounds. The throat needed to be placed there first before it could begin to talk or try to talk.

This was a place closed to all the liberalism that, as by definition, resided nowhere and floated over every "place". Here the feelings were not something you had and then ceased to have; rather here the feeling you would walk through and sometimes would find yourself as if lost inside, so that you carried it outside from that point on, from now on a part of you, and a part of "outside", if there really were a place "outside", a place that was not simply of poetry.

*

The girl understood the place because its inexpressible dimensions -- its way of only becoming clear to the person who was actually there within the clarity -- evoked that other lost world of faith, that world she felt she'd lost, that world of faith that refused to become clear on a secular tongue, because only residing was really saying, the only way to say was to occupy what was mysteriously said. So she had exchanged one scorned place for another, unless they might have actually been the same place. Were the 2 places kin? Unrecognized, unacknowledged, but sharing all the essential proteins and membranes?

Name this place, the wind said. Do it now, without fear. Ha. The name was like ha or like aha.

*

Its borders were damage. Its borders were what the wind blew down. The frail and collapsing structure of its edgeless edge led people to dismiss it, just like that other place. Here one corner was demarcated by a wounded animal, a stray dog with 2 legs, the 4th having been eaten by a passing car. It was not the dog himself but his harrowingly unquenched spirit, his need to live, the way he continued hoping and hopping without his 4th leg -- that was the corner of this world. That was one corner of the Place that was Poetry. No corner at all, no common structure whatsoever. Unless aspiration were something you could call a structure.

The 2nd corner was a grove of trees in a rainforest, a grove inhabited by dissheveled nymphs, ladies of rain from a Ronsard verse, the bureaucrats of dream, no no, it was really just filled with chattering monkeys and bright jagged birds, geckos saturated with paint. The spider webs bent into their backbends, opening their glistening and manly chests to the scented breath of the wind, silly wind, while in the center of each web a little animal lay unplucked, a tiny ripening fruit. Neurotically quivering, the whole grove seemed to twist in avoidance as the strangers approached with their torches, craving the farmland, and this was the second corner of the Place called Poetry. Going gong gone! Sand through the hand. Yet everything inside this dry red-rubbed boundary was so moist and vulnerable and impossible. Everything outside was by contrast healthy and pramatic and to be feared, so it seemed. The bored liberals in their SUVS watching on little portable televisions. The girl walked softly on the softer side of life, holding her breath, afraid to exhale. Babies, be ever watchful!

The third corner of the Place was nothing but a sound. Did it occur? Had it occurred yet? Did it move the air when it moved? One heart and tried to interpret this sort of torn membrane of speech, the song of the reaper that Wordsworth half-heard in the field. It gnawed at the ear and made it the object. It had meaning. The meaning could not be left alone or dismissed or really discussed, you could not say you didn't care what it meant because then the sound would become a trifle and it wasn't that, no, you cared what it was but didn't know what it was. So you follwed it and it eluded you, harbored somehow in some sense of transcendence reminding you that the place you stood was only a placeholder or a pointer, the outward sign of a certain invisible bliss and the emanation of the one who was the cause of all bliss. Do not forget him, whatever else you do! And his hymn filled your life, this hymn that came from another room, where someone else was ecstatically singing. And this sound was the third corner of the Place.

The fourth corner could not be described or encompassed. It loosened the idea of perimeter and left you suspended. It was like wine that had changed from water. Its darkness was like the portal to another place less clearly charted. You were wisely afraid to approach. The words that recurred in rhyme and meter were as if its shadow. When people said that this fourth corner was an illusion, you couldn't refute them. You couldn't just point it out to them. You couldn't even rely on Euclidean geometry, not here. There was nothing here that could be known at second hand. It was not something that could be poured from a box and reconstituted with water. You could not teach it in a class. It was not formatted for download. It did not appear on the schedule. It wasn't an experiment that you could replicate because even having it happen once was somehow for most beyond all hope. You could not just trap it and bring it to the surface because delicate things explode and lightless things burn in the light. You might lose your hands even touching it. So you did not call but responded to the call, that is, you hoped you did and hoped you could.

*

She was a girl who found it easier to love her neighbor than to love herself. Herself she did not love. Yet it was a kind of mandate to do so, to try. Poetry dissolved matters of esteem and it softened the self. She found it easier to live there.

At night the old malaise recurred and rocked her. She dreamed of the process of salvation. By definition -- a judgment wedged in the very structure of things -- one's loathsome aspects, in their greasy wrappers, could not be saved. You could be saved but the aspects no. Saying so was silly smalltalk. So if backbiting was a thing you did, that thing would be surgically sliced away. If anything was left it might be saved. In her dream she walked a hallowed place with half of her being cut and extricated, thrown into the landfill of nothingness -- Sheol. What remained was good but could it even stand? Was there even one leg left for standing? Was there enough of the tongue left to talk? "Sharper than a razor", that organ.

When she awoke the poetry stood around her in silence, having somehow dispensed with words.

*