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.