for Tara

All poems copyrighted © Noel K. Anderson

Piecemeal

The mere fringe of God’s robe

carpets the temple floor.

Angels clothed in humility,

modesty, and joy harmonize:

Holy, Holy, Holy! 

Everything glows with God’s glory!

The song is an earthquake;

dust and smoke fill the sanctuary.

I despaired, for I am a worm

and all humanity scum.

An angel took a holy coal 

and put it on my mouth. 

Like a baby blindly seeking its mother’s breast,

I took its heat.

Words spoken here and there

like arrhythmic drops

at the end of an angry storm.

The sacred songs are sung

to different clocks in different dialects–

each tribe in its own rules–

the specific elaborations 

of their fathers’ fathers

played with pride, undiminished in joy.

They seek and strive but to name themselves.

They follow the menu, intending their best,

and eat all the meal but do not digest.

To eat is to crave for a taste

of that which surpasses understanding.

To drink, a chance to be ourselves poured out,

to draw the blood of our hearts’ remanding. 

Fragrant Offering

Blood-splattered fabric

and three-thousand slaughtered kinsmen

spread out under an Arabian sun.

Dust, sweat and grime—a thick paste on furrowed brows.

We gather as we walk—plodding forward as victors

wearing the burdens of having won—

long-faced winners looking like losers,

kings and queens of promise picking in the dirt

for stones and seeds.

The goods we get just meet our needs

and the good we get just meets our needs.

Bull fat burning near incense—

smoke going up, dust from dust,

rising to divine nostrils:

The smell of good intentions

from momentary good behavior.

To all you who tremble under an erosion of tears,

Join in with the singing if you have ears.

Poring Over Texts

Mexican gangster graffit i–indecipherable

to the Antiquities professor–befouls a wall

once ivy-covered, now barren.

He carries his books in a barrister’s briefcase–

its old black leather cracked and softened 

through years’ scrapes and bumps, 

now bean-brown shreds blossom from the corners–

he is stealing the books.  

They are old and unappreciated, relics of the Age of Print,

but precious additions to his home library, 

whose shelves sag bent with overstacking.

Down the steps, 

a Gideon hands out free New Testaments to passing students,

who ignore him like a salesman.

The briefcase grows heavy and the professor switches hands, 

putting it between himself and the Gideon.

Plenty of New Testaments will be littered through the parking lot.

He picks up several before reaching his father’s old jeep–

its romance of rusticity now overshadowed by an idling insecurity.

Getting home is all that matters anymore.

Saddle shoes catch the mud-caked pedal treads,

and the seven gifts of Gideon jolt onto the backseat floor,

the word of God stirring at every turn.

Home, he spreads the antiquities and the testaments

on the dining room table and adjusts his bifocals.

Poring over the texts, he palms off teary eyes, 

blinding browsweat now failing to descry the writing on the wall:

a neglected interpretation–

the untranslated graffiti of God.

Glenville, CA

Through this endless host of oaks and ponderosa

across these fields, blonded by foxtail,

earnest cattle moo back and forth 

like a cello septet in free time,

each voice sweeping in and out 

in a time signature all their own. 

Above this, the high, staccato scrape

of woodpeckers and scrub jays.

The song–to the best I can tell–

is something about 

passion, pain, and deep longing.

It is waking excitement, a groaning 

like a woman with birth pangs:

a prayer that struggles to be released.

Orthodoxy

All luck ran out, all hope was lost–

our champion dead and double-crossed–

upon a hill, above Adam and skull,

the live head wrecked to broken shell

by hammer hard or dagger dull

as spirits slept in a silent hell.

One camel broke the needle eye,

cracked open that circle infinitely wide,

so through it now the whole spinning earth can fly

and none from its wideness of mercy can hide.

And they live within the seasons,

(taking all the perfect days for granted)

convinced and committed to all the reasons

by which their negativity is planted,

like that sleek, black, Jaguar parked out front,

her teeth and claws all gleaming chrome.

In her belly, the children who bore the brunt

of sin and sacrifice in each affluent home.

The Jaguar leaps to life with a roar

to devour her masters, whose hands she evaded

and she’ll run down ten million children before

her ravenous appetite for blood is sated.

The neighbors were terrorized and hid in their rooms

praying to gods whose names they can’t name.

The rampage runs. In the street, bloody fumes

confirm their worst fears–the end of the game.

We scoured the news and video clips

but the story came from the only one willing to tell.

He quivered as the words leapt from his lips:

“The jaguar has eaten the camel as well!”

Yes, all of them died, and to hell they all went

for failure to humble their hearts and repent.

Bezel Frieze

Agamemnon sleeps on his side, 

dreaming about a bed made from the trunk of a tree. 

His wife and dogs await him somewhere across the water, 

but here he sleeps, the grass for a bed, 

a cloth-covered rock for a pillow, 

and hundreds of enemies seeking him 

somewhere in the nearby darkness. 

Like a bubble rising from the bottom of a deep lake, 

a feeling of warmth rises up his spine–

the sound of her voice in his memory 

lights his confidence if only for a moment.

The danger surrounds him–he remembers

and feels the thunder. 

The song in his mind—the melody of her love sung 

for him alone—tells him he has lived,

and he breathes even now a grateful reprise–

one even death can not degrade. 

Should he wake before a blade strikes his neck, 

he will not gasp or cry out. 

Though he and every man be lost to death, 

a greater war has already been won: 

a life lived with vibrant remembrance

of the gift and receipt of genuine love.

This Party

It’s easy to feel like a stranger in here,

surrounded by loud, chattering people–

all of whom seem to know each other

better than we know anyone else–

as though this is their hometown

and everyone else distant family.

The thickening bloodline posts no vacancies.

If you’re not in, you won’t be getting in. 

Around my head hovers 

a fat cloud of self-pity, 

but if I can manage to get out of it,

a golden nimbus will glow in its place:

a crown given to those

who freely consent to things as they are,

letting all things be what they are

without a grumble or murmur–

refusing to abandon joy–

to delight in the particularity of each one.

To learn to give that and to give as a practice,

make me too part of the known family. 

Divine Spark

What they call the Divine Spark

is not divine at all

except as a divine gift.

It is the ghost of knowing—

the electric song behind the eyes

revealing light from light—

the ghost glowing in swelling awareness,

singing “I AM! I AM!”

Never tiring, never satisfied,

never settling to be enough.

A spring of no worldly source

ever regenerate, ever swelling,

ever life-giving.

The spark hungers for sustenance, 

longs for longevity, 

and seeks eternity at all costs

against the promise of death.

“I’ve lived long enough” is unthinkable

except to those who have never lived 

and those who live beyond death.

Spark, spring, flame, splash, torrent blaze–

a splash of flame then a wildfire flood—

the Spirit’s appearance in flesh, in blood.

We remember and feel the thunder.

Incarnation

When God took on flesh,

emotions reached divine proportions.

He scratched the itch of mosquito bites

with fingernails that chipped, split,

and caught the dirt of the grit of the earth

between careful cleanings.

He tasted the pleasure of familiar foods,

of favorite wines, well-anticipated.

He looked up and loved 

the glory of cloud-strewn skies,

and with every peaceable sunset

thanked his Father for the coming of night,

portending eternal dawn. 

And the body of Jesus stung

with knots in the throat, with hot tears,

and the adrenal buzz of bodily anxiety. 

He felt and felt deeply,

with volumes of feeling

and with those terrible, loud cries

which vented the divine captivity.

Ghosts in the Smoke

There’s light in the air that

has travelled from the sun. 

Beaming through the moisture

like sand in an hourglass,

wave-particles contract into lines and

ricochet off my true love’s face–

from every velvety cheek pore to my seeking eyes. 

Light surrounds us with speeds 

we see in part but never fully know. 

We swim a vast ocean–

all photons above and below– 

we are now all in on the quantum joke,

and we drift through the light

like ghosts in the smoke. 

The face of my beloved, like the static TV snow

emerges salt and peppered

through the fog of sprayed light–

a face so finely-tuned to the frequency of my longing,

she could only be a message.

Every intention half-revealed, 

each motive half-concealed,

a grammar described by a grimace of uncertainty–

but this too dissolves into a song of reconnection–

the exchange of joyful submission 

that looks just like what we think love should look like.

This incense of gestures and language,

like a prayer at the bloody altar rises and mixes

with light and lights, clouds, stars,

and the unending, moonstruck tides 

of immeasurably-much salt water.

M’Lady

I tend to refuse to talk or listen;

she talks when she listens

except when she doesn’t.

Lines refuse to overlap,

subjects defy organization,

inspiration comes thin and weak—

to say without saying is not even thinkable.

The unthinkable is unspeakable, 

but it is of this we think.

Better to think without speaking

than to speak at all. 

This illness is my beloved–a silent angel

whose face is ever hidden–whose flowing, 

golden hair I daily chase.

And there is a land, whether happy or hollow I do not know, 

beyond the ends of the seven seas 

where disembodied souls may go,

where she and I can gather fruit from golden trees, 

drink the milk of the morning breeze,

savor the honey of stingless bees,

where mind and mind will know and know.

Fear of Divorce

Love that is not infatuation is love nonetheless,

perhaps even moreso. The counselor said:

Friendship is 80 percent of every good marriage.

Yet we are unnerved by the mystery of commingling,

manifest now in eye contact gone awry—

the incapacity for intimacy played off as a cute joke,

the freedom of feeling reverting to shy.

What we always wanted undergoes adult revisions;

Its new directions manifest in wicked words and rash decisions.

The failure of trust reduces me to a husband on parole,

my compliments taken as falsehoods;

my every good service perceived as a means to control.

It’s all about selfhood—self-preservation, saving face–

all about power 

once words have been depleted,

the former affections all thereafter replaced 

by the souring envies of the defeated.

Yet good intentions still live 

beyond romantic love’s cessation;

authentic love does not depend 

upon reciprocation.

Its veracity we need not doubt,

nor should we much disparage 

to seek out our loving roles and steadfast duties 

within the blessed narrative of marriage.

Alive

I know   I am alive.

Every day, in unanticipated moments

the message like a flash wakes me

from the ordinary minutes to the

extraordinary eternal.  It says: 

“You are really here,” 

but I wonder what on earth is happening. 

Sometimes I seek it and it appears,

electric consciousness, super sobriety,

and I know God could not be 

clowning around with us.

It comes to me when I call it—

this seeking the kingdom.

In the seeking is the finding,

having in the desire.

I am. She is.  We are

(I get it! Do you?)

Here is holiness and righteousness both—

in the unadorned, unarmed, sensitive

tenderness of the open soul,

the exposed spirit,

the runner outpacing

the time-keeper. 

I taste eternity—a given gift—

and to live in it is to be alive,

to taste it to know that you live. 

Not only to live, but moreso to know that 

life is absolutely good; 

only the soul-blind say otherwise.

You can have this life if you want it,

but first you want it, then see it,

and then say yes to the gift. 

The Porch

This morning

from our back porch

my wife and I sit and watch

the trees change color

(we don’t have cable)

from green to yellow

then orange to red.

We ooh and aah

and clap our hands

like other people watching fireworks.

Then after a sip of coffee

we watch the last leaves fall

and a marvel as the snow covers each limb.

Another sip or two, and they are green again.

We shake our heads

in wonder at the beauty

and the speed of the change.

It has been quite a morning.

Laqueesha Adoramus

She floats on gently beating wings

down the hall

to the back bedroom

into the tiny bathroom. 

She looks in the mirror

weighing each blemish against beauty

and chooses whether or not to live.

I never know whether she will

open the door

or I will. 

My ears are ever tuned

to the sound of wings

floating up the hall.