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.

*

The place of being - Chap 1: Parable of the garden

*

The 2 children were not evicted -- from the Garden of Orthodoxy, where they'd grown up -- but, more simply, wandered away from it one day and were unable to get back. Or was it really "wandered"? Had there been a plan?

What was it that we did? the girl wondered. What closed the door?

Was it like the heart's semilunar valve -- the valve that allows egress, lets you out -- but doesn't afford a path for returning? So was it a natural process?

Oh no, her crazy brother said. Face it, sister, we were booted out. We grew up. No place for adults in *that* place.

Orthodoxy (he said -- with the air of certainty people use when they are not sure but wish to be) -- this orthodoxy is for children. We are moving beyond. And high time.

Then he went back to his college and she to hers -- and they rarely saw each other after that. Because that painful thing -- dispersion-- was one of the side effects of their banishment. If "banishment" was the right word, the correct word to use. If that was not too harsh.

She was no longer sure of this or of anything. She continued to pray, morning and evening. She continued to believe, even as she stood in a wide place of unbelief and felt herself not estranged from its wideness. When her roommate laughed at her gestures of faith she still did not waver. That was something to remember.

For surely you can talk to me of impersonal science. But I have lived in a place where even impersonal things -- insofar as they were there -- had a face, had an intention -- acknowledged that they too were part of a larger plan. It wasn't what they knew but where they stood that mattered.

People today will grovel in their uncertainty. In the past we never did that. It never occurred to us. Maybe it wasn't possible to do that, where we were.

*

In her adulthood she found faith but not the comfort of faith. A certain part of her soul was as if starving in its speculative abundance.

The pain was not trivial. It was not something you could brag about overcoming -- or simply dismiss -- or discuss in a casual conversation -- or measure on a dial. Simple meditation could not shuck it off. No exertion took it away. Drugs and alcohol were not an option, though her roommate insisted she would feel better if she only let herself relax.

Because faith is not something that you "have" but is more like the register of a dial. It points to something outside it that is pointing to *it*. It is a measurement of something immeasurable and it lies inside the will but is not something you will.

So the girl -- the straight backed nubile woman -- thrown out of her garden now, walked through the place in which she found herself. Wearisome, full of pain, a path sharply pointed.

Yet shaped and cultivated. Like a garden.

*

"Poetry makes nothing happen."

*

Poetry makes something happen, after all:
poetry readings, poetry submissions,
poetry contests, poetry prizes, sections of poetry in bookstores,
canonic anthologies, workshops, courses in schools,

there is an entire industry, employing thousands,
counting part-timers in kitchens at night,
a market or something that wants to be
buying and selling, but more selling than buying.
Does all of this make something happen?

Is it counted as something by the mysterious ones
who count the world's significance and make the significance?
And in the legitimacy of these awful beings
does poetry play a part?

If you asked one -- a politician controlling grant money --
he (she? it?) might say
in that hollowed tone that says what it thinks
another thinks,

that "poetry is the bedrock of a civilized society"
or something equally bedrocky
and null -- so null,

and the words would be simultaneously
a vote for poetry and a vote against,

because anyway nobody buys or sells bedrock
and nobody cares about it.
The real question is whether power stores poetry

by the bedside and, if so,
does he read it, actually read it

and, if he does, does something happen? Did it make something happen?
Did it make nothing happen?
What would count as happening for him?

I think poetry -- not the thing, I doubt there's a thing
but say the industry -- the activity, the practice, the living it --
is like Hollywood, a place negligible from a foot away,
but enter it and suddenly it's everything,

not only makes things happen but is what happens
and is the feel of the happening, and
that is where you and I stand now?
Or has the sweet foot crept out of the circle?

*

In the Garden of Orthodoxy

*

It was the sweet garden of refreshment. It was not a creed but a wish. Your wish to be there was how you came to be there. It was not work that you did that got you there. It was your wish to be there you walked along. The path was a wish. The wish then became the place or was the place. The creed in a sense came later, the creed was words of history, historical words that you took for your own in order to describe where you were or really who you were. Words described things correctly but what mattered was what they described, that was really all that mattered. The place you walked to.

The plants hung in exertion and strain.

You walked along the path. As for this sweet scented garden, you never knew when you'd arrived - it was so lucid and so transparent that, even as you were standing in an industrial parking lot, you might say you were there. It extended its branches everywhere potentially. Sitting on a public bench you were there. That is, if you wanted to be.

*

In the Garden of Orthodoxy, there was no law. As one walked toward God -- if one did -- no law was needed or possible. The walk itself was obedience. Without obedience the feet couldn't even move.

So... if faith was lawful, that was only an attribute that it had. It was like the smell that the flowers gave off, as if by nature. As if in no way coerced to obey. Because obedience itself is impossible to coerce or constrain. So as a person walked, the walk itself did all of the work - that is, if the walk was the right one, in the right direction. And then everything else followed. The attention turned that way and then the heart followed.

*

Poem: The form of her house

*

When someone dies, the house they occupied
becomes so strangely like the animals
we'd model from papier-mache.
Each animal held a balloon inside
upon which children slathered pasted strips
of paper then would decorate
that slather till the moment that
we popped and tugged the now useless balloon.

Its shape remained but it was gone
except that the departure shaped
a ghostly form that stood as though it had
a core -- but didn't -- and now never could.

*