Transfiguration

The clouds of unknowing roll over me,
nuclear in their design,
probably like those that carried him,
his spirit out to the Pacific and beyond

the vapor trail I view on the horizon
now. An airliner lifts off, brushes
the cross on the steeple,
the silence into sonic resonances.

Like the SAC bomber that buzzed
across his hermitage’s roof
(its bay doors, the jaws of Apocalypse,
if opened could swallow the countryside).

The same type of bomber that took him
stateside. On Sunday after Mass,
I listen to the blues in the common room,
ponder the irony of lyrics, saints’ fates.

Discernment

Squawk from the laurel breaks my psalm-chant.
Expecting a raven, I cross the threshold
of contemplation only to find the unexpected
staring me down just off the four-wheel path.
He paces around the hermitage like the hunter
that he is, telling me to leave him to his prey,
probably the wild turkey clan that hobbled by
earlier. So a fellow brother later tells me.
I do not know that now, think this creature
some manifestation of evil come to interrupt
my prayer. I rebuke him, rattling my beads
at him, warding off his wiles, his deceitful
beauty. Yet he remains, crying, circling me,
vigilant in his torment, testing my motives
for invading his territory, my will to stay.
Later that night I imagine his den underneath
my cot, him scratching at my floorboards.
For now I return to my lectio, his forlorn cry
just a hue of the creation, the eternal now
like temptation, suffering, death. Inescapable.

Not pictured in order of importance, or listed in order of importance:

1. The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff: On a reading group of which I am an erstwhile member on Shelfari, I first heard of this book. I’m about 70 or so pages into it and so far, so good. It’s a complex book about a young woman who returns to her hometown of Templeton, New York, which is based on Cooperstown, New York. She arrives an unwed pregnant mother from a tryst with a professor and just as the town is discovering a monster on the shores of a nearby lake, but other monsters await in her family history.
2. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, translated by Kieren Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D.: O.C.D., by the way, stands for Discalced Carmelite Order, with discalced, meaning “barefoot or unshod”. My spiritual director gave me this book this morning at the concluding ceremony of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola that I just finished last week because she knew I already was reading The Living Flame of Love, also by St. John of the Cross. I look forward to reading this, although this won’t be a book I finish in a day or week or even a month. It might be several months or several years before I get through this one, because if any book is meant to be contemplated, it is definitely this one.
3. 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, selected and with an introduction by Billy Collins: This is one I’ve been perusing over the last month or so. Collins, former Poet Laureate of the U.S., helped start the Poetry 180 initiative, which brings clear, contemporary poems into the nation’s high schools, a poem for each day of the school year. For more on the project, see Poetry 180. This is the second collection from the project.
4. Sailing Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins: I saw this at the library only yesterday and decided to pick it up because I don’t think I’ve read this one. I may have perused it once on the shelf, but I don’t think I’ve read it.

After working on the formatting for this for a couple of hours, since I am no HTML wizard, finally I have the poem for today’s WordSmith Wednesday. Hope you enjoy, especially after all the work to get it here.

One of my New Year’s resolutions this year, as every year, was to read more books. I love books, but don’t have enough, well, make enough, time to read the ones I’d like to read. I composed this poem a few years ago as a reflection on my lifelong love of books:

The Fountainhead

— after smelling a dusty copy of a John McPhee book
I picked up at the library for 50 cents

1.

I was biking down
the Marsh Creek Road
that day when I spied it,
lying there, cover ripped off,
inviting me to stop
and pick it up.

Inside its pages was
a story of
the architectural superiority
of man, how he had built
skyscrapers to show
his greatness.

I stooped down and
learned to what heights
men could climb.

Later reading Jon Krakauer,
I learned of men
who failed to attain such
heights alive,

but for now,
with one bare knee in the dirt,
as I read her philosophical objectivism,

I chose not think of how
from dust I had come,
to dust I would return.

I let my thoughts soar higher.

2.

Or inside its pages was
a song not of myself, but of America
free,

of Texas gaining its independence,

of Alaska and Hawaii,
and even farther out

space, the final frontier

of California

and its Valley of the Dolls.

We thumb through the lurid details of the lives

of others, celebrities like
they were going out of fashion, lurid details

that is, but they’re not,

they are so chic, so in
the moment, so…so….
(“a man breathes deep into his saxophone”)
American.

3.

From a satellite, I see that boy kneeling
beside the back road, wish
I could be like him.
I need to be like him,
in love with the printed word,

(like my neighbor John,
who has to print out
articles from the Internet he wants to read

– he has to touch them, feel their weight,

their heft

to make it a corporeal

presence

like ink smudging on your fingers
after reading a newspaper)

not the digitized code
a poem like this breaks down into eons later.