All poems copyrighted © Noel K. Anderson

I.  Week One

Scattered, sacred movement:  hot, suspended dust,

fonts of radiance, wheels of hot light.

Water in dust, wind-hardened mud,

leaf and scale, vine and bloody sinew

tendon and tendril, seed-sack and eyeball,

gaping mouth and wapping tail

waving fan and flicking fin,

broken bone and sharpened tooth,

piercing claw and stinging tail,

spine, horn and joint,

hair and feathers, tuft and comb,

warble, wattle, and thrumming drone,

hoof and flank, skin and fur,

meat and muscle, gleet and blood,

gristle, fat and hardened nail,

shriek and bleat, grunt and groan,

chirp and bark, howl and wail,

biting fang and shredding claw

growling grunt and hissing spit

roaring song and throbbing urge

mounting impulse and grating nerve

whine, whimper, moan and sigh,

rollover, sleep, dream and die.

All that breathes by God’s own breath

Slips the the slope to certain death.

II.  Hilde’s Headache

She sees stars flying across the sky in daytime

And coal showers like black snow,

And at the center of all things

She sees the Great Light

Inside its many circles,

Its many cycles and gyres,

And all she will say about it is:

“GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD”

I ask her for pictures and she paints a golden fortress—

Walls and four corners,

And phosphorescent angels falling through the rain

Into the cold, cold sea.

Sometimes she makes me want to pray.

My phone rings in the night—She says:

“I had a dream about the end of time. . .

There were voices of dead people shouting ‘Beware!’

And the sun shone like a ripe tomato,

The crescent moon ,a fingernail clipping,

Slouched in sad repose, deep in labor,

Giving birth to showers of shooting stars:

“GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD”

I didn’t know what to tell her; I don’t know how to help.

Sometimes she makes me want to pray

And I don’t know what to tell her.

III.  The Sex Life of Nuns Part II

So pious and discreet—

no one ever knew that

she never shaved her legs

above the knees.

She never showed them.

These things all change with time—

the pinafore luxuries and dainty delights

give way to silences, deep and rich.

The younger twinges of regret,

the afterthoughts of missed opportunities

melt and dissolve on the surface

of a good silence.

Maternal sentimentality  dissolves somewhere

down the road not taken,

and the deep swellings of the body

soothe in time like calming breath,

deep sighs, cheek on pillow,

bread for the world,

blood in a bowl.

IV.   Dying

As I die, all that continues in life

appears brimming—

burstingly alive.

All around me

simple things glow alight with life

Bathed in waves of newness.

O that I were one of them!

To be a simple seagull,

alive and mostly mindless

fighting for fish heads at the dock,

seems a lavish fortune.

To be one of my empty sandals

there on the floor

would be life in air and color,

or even to be a simple grain of sand

and bathe daily in sun and sea with

my millions of brothers and sisters—

this seems future enough.

Everything that is not me

I must praise.

All that exists

Independent of my existence

I must quickly learn to love.

V.   Jacob Under the Boardwalk 

          (see Genesis 32)

The tide gently rises where the waters kiss the land,

Beneath the slats of dock above, we wrestle in the sand.

We slam the wooden pillars with our elbows and our knees;

We bounce between these timbers like a dance among the trees.

There is no one to hear us play along this stretch of beach,

And though we scream in pain and rage, all ears are out of reach.

Bright stripes of light and shadow play a strobe on our embrace

And yet for all our torrid moves I cannot see your face.

You throw me from my balance, to you I try the same,

And though we touch as intimates I do not know your name.

Fair and foul are relative to passions known and felt,

Like lovers locked in love or war you strike below the belt.

Through pain, fatigue and fecklessness, I end the wretched test,

With firm resolve I hold you fast, demanding I be blessed.

Settling in to stilling fear, I find my temper tamed;

Hand-to-loin you find the hold by which I am renamed.

“Jacob, have you any intent to fulfill these blessings you steal?

Can we expect from the thief of God’s good gifts the wisdom to use them to heal?”

Once alone, I felt not alone but comforted as though with a friend

A warmth in the darkness said “All things are new” 

before my life’s night came to end.

The Blessing takes, I am reborn, but my joy is not yet complete

My life, my loves and all that I own approach my dear brother’s feet

Only a thirst for mercy and Grace from this penitent heart I yell

For he is worthy of all that I have and  I am   Israel.

                VI.    King of the Hill                      

Angry boys, dirty shirts torn from struggles

Fight for position on the high mound.

Tight-lipped frenzies, bulldog underbites,

Sweat cutting dust on the brow.

Their cries are sharp but as yet immature—

The growling and whelps of some wild litter.

In throngs they cling to the pile

Like hiving bees or swarming ants.

They pick their steps and claw ahead,

Making for King of the Hill.

What kind of power each boy wields

Depends upon what he’s been given.

Bodies of boys wrecked by the strain

Fell to pad the ground far below.

The King stands tall for a moment or two

To savor his second of grace,

But his ankles are seized by two hands and then four.

In that very moment when he reaches his height

He flails his arms as though he might fly

But plummets to ruinous night.

There is another hill, not too far away

Where those who ascend do not hate;

Their steps are calm, though heavily trod

As if beneath some great weight.

Here there are no scrabbles, no tousles, no toil

There is but one path to the crest

Each one to tread this sacred soil

Bears a cross at the King’s own behest.

The King of this hill reigns from above

And he calls all the players to climb.

The journey is hard—the impetus, Love

And the glorious reward most sublime.

VII.   HOW TO DEFEAT AN ARMED MAN [knife]

1.  Take the knife for granted(everyone has one).

2.  Keep your own knife concealed (but near at the draw).

3.  Make him forget he is carrying a knife

         (get him to take the knife for granted).

4.  Flatter him with an honest heart.

5.  Pretend the knife is a microphone and sing into it.

VIII.  CALVIN CREST

The last night of the week, we gathered after dinner—

put on our good clothes

and stuck flashlights in our jacket pockets.

We marched in procession to a field

where a bonfire burnt old branches.

White wax dripped onto our hands;

some kids molded it into lumpy figures and threw them into the fire.

Our mentor prayed for us and invited us to pray for each other

but we did not know how to pray,

so we thanked one another for being there.

We named the names of those we loved,

those whom we were learning to love and those who loved us—

this is how we learned to pray.

So we prayed around the fire;

soon there were tears, and with the tears real prayers

dripped from our faces like candle wax.

One by one we began—

to rise like sparks from the fire,

to rise like prayer into the star-sprayed sky—

and two by two we began embracing.

We embraced in witness to that spirit that made us one,

just as our prayers became one in their ascent.

We spoke to one another through the spirit that makes us one,

saying I love you as prayers into the eyes of our many beloved.

Spirit spoke these words through us

and then we spoke them on our own;

Our beloved was that same Spirit that teaches us to pray.

We were one in the Spirit and the Spirit one in us

and this memory is our character:

A fire burning old branches, candlewax, tears—

   a good, consuming fire.

IX.   Notion One    (A Hymn)

Love and Beauty honor Thee

Beyond what pen and word may say

For Thou art high above the skies

And we but dust and clay.

We scrabble-out our wretched hymns

And trumpet forth their praise

Yet these make bitter, fragile fare

For Thee, Ancient of Days.

Thy goodness is of such a kind

As we cannot descry

Our futile flailings of the lungs

Shape worship short and shy.

And yet Thou Lord, Almighty One

Who fashions earth and sky

Do bow Thy great and holy ear

To hear our by-and-by.

That Thou may hear our bleating

Amidst our howling Sin

Tis greater Grace and Mercy

Than can be named herein.

“That Thou shouldst hear us”—Notion One

Should be our highest prayer

To which all earthly piety

Is loathsome by compare.

And yet Thy Love goes deeper still—

To hear our noise as praise.

Oh Lord our shepherd,  Lord Our God,

Receive this din we raise!

X.    The Puppies

I thought it would be fun to let the puppies run on the frozen pond,

so I let them go.

The ice was risky thin; I worried it might break and drown some of them,

so I stepped out onto the edge of the ice, reached out and called to them.

These puppies are too young and silly to know

that I am trying to save them;

they have no awareness of the real danger.

Some of the puppies ran away from my hand—maybe “for freedom’s sake”

or some other such puppy thought.

Others ran to me for fear of the ice and pond in general;

but they had never left the bank to begin.

Several others ran to me only because they love me:

oblivious to the danger, they just wanted to lick my hand

and feel my caresses.

When the time for selection comes,

these are the ones  

I will keep. 

XI.   Bouquet

I lay spread on Fortune’s dirty floor

but my heart beat with strength and the fearlessness of Love,

When a new fear entered my life—an intense fear nestled amid joy and longing

like a spider in a bouquet.

There are moments to say “I am that scurvy spider and nothing else.”

or “I am the flowers and none of the dirt.” 

but these are lies told to avoid Truth, which is this:

            Grace

We are the spider, the colored blossoms, and the dirt.

We are leaf and stem, root and tendril, fuzzy husk and insect egg burrowed deep.

We are vase, pollen and pistil; dust and vaporous air.

We are in fact the whole room:  furniture filling empty spaces;

wallpaper, paint and carpet; dust mote and dust-mote-parasite clinging like life

at the chance of adding a moment to these mysterious floatings around.

The fear cannot be denied—

It wails siren lies in otherwise calm spaces.

We carry it on our lips and in stained memories

like embarrassing photos  our families will not let us destroy.

The fear is on us like cancer, but the Grace carries us nonetheless.

Grace is Truth, greater than life, and the only sanity is in its obedience.

To submit to Grace is the only victory over fear.

To submit to Grace is the only path to Love.

Suddenly, beauty becomes real.

You and I walk into beauty and breathe her air;

because we are considering Grace.

We are visited by beauty even as color visits the bouquet,

and I see there reflected the colors of my beloved.

XII.    Judgment Day

Through sleepwalks unnumbered

I marched to the point of waking.

In a dingy kitchen

I pour beans from a pan

and think of friends slain in the Spirit.

They spilled psychic bile in the pews

and convulsed, possessed.

Is this freedom of faith or forced catharsis?

Am I too at this point?

Why not?

What fruit does it bear(other than done deals for similar purges)?

We hear:

“Two brothers out there crave their redemption”

    and all come forward.

“One with an addiction”

    and all come forward.

“One with vile imaginings”

    and no one is left behind,

For in the end, no one is left behind;

in the end of ends, we all come forward.