Hello loved ones. Every year around this time I write four triptychs for Advent (here is the cycle from 2021, and here is the one from 2022. This year, instead of four cycles of three poems each, I chose to weave all of them together into one 12-part poem. I hope it serves as a worthy meditation and prayer for you in your celebrations this year. Thanks (as always) for joining me in this space.
IN CONVERTENDO
“When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing: then said they among the heathen, The Lord hath done great things for them. The Lord hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad.
Turn again our captivity, O Lord, as the streams in the south. They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.” (Psalm 126)
"From galactic silence protect us." (Czeslaw Milosz)
I. Far out beyond the edge of cosmic wreck, the solitary shards of icy light are flaking from some super-heated heart. A comet sheers, careens along a trackless wilderness of stars. A billion suns are sloughing off their worn-out solar skins. A billion moons rotate their granite chins to planet, midnight, starlight, back again. This ever-swelling eon, belly-curving, backlit in penumbric pregnancy, the forms of heaven-bodies bending, breaking over one another in their arcs, like angels sculpted out of gas and dust, like pillars crushing on in constant motion, these unstoppable leviathans. The breadth of it unseen, unknown (so far the vantage point of revolutions lies), and not a single corner of this chaos touchable, the vacuum instant death. And yet the whole thing throbs at frequencies unknown to human ears. It has been loved zoetic, seen in its unseenness, so impossibly alive it squirms and thrills. We stand before the edge of all that breathes and squint to see through our electric nets, retrace old lines our fathers drew between the supergiant stars, of gods and hunters, scorpions and sons, to tame the dark, the chasm opening before our feet, the terror of the rift between the little we can know and every unknown thing. And who can understand the tracks of trackless spheres or measure what we cannot count? And what of this, the heart, deceitful far above all things we know and don't? How far infinity must stretch to reach the ground! II. So pierce the veil, the clouded emblem of our fears, the smoke of incense burned to mask the scent of sin and filth of years, and all the blood from every innocent congealing in the runnels, thin to thick, until we only chance an entry retrograde. Our ceiling is accumulative, ringing like the hammer of a god upon the anvil. We are metal in between. And as a child, I watched these heavy storms expand, so nimble in the rising wind. The leaves – I see them still – they skitter off like roaches in a sudden light. It haunts my nights, rotation. Mustard-colored clouds. The heavy funnel of a life that stabs so many fissures in the groaning ground. The birds are silent when it starts, and strange. We gather on the rim of battlefields, the cruel clouds of war within our eyes, the sky that darkens under watch. But then I know: we are not watchers. We are War. III. The seeds are sown, the leavings water earth until it glows sea-green. The life of this unstable, tilting globe is in its seas, the silver flash of fins and scales, the sub- aquatic echoes of behemoths lost in thought, the mineralic mesas thrusting up through crashing waves, the coral reefs sharp-toothed, soft-stingered havens misbehaved. I need to know: which longitude and latitude now harbors love? We thought the waters right or wrong, the fluctuating plots of oil-stained sea, the souls all sold, now sub- marine. The wars have long been lost and won, so we float aimless in an endless ebb, and wait for maelstroms, lash ourselves to masts against the siren songs, and long for worlds where home is really home. We scan the waves: horizons hoped-for, saving grace, a glimpse of land to call our own? O Dwelling, dwell with us. O Living Land, become our Cove. IV. The rain has passed, and under clay-locked acres lies a city stratified in eras, seasons piled atop each other, still. The deaths of last year layer over deaths of years before: an alchemy of leaf mold, green manure, castings, compost, dung. The rain has come and gone, and broken down the last of this year's loss into the cracks. I settle into silence more these days. I love the furrow for its mumbling shape, the starfield for its hollow company. What have we done to fill our world? We live with sunken feet, lodged deep inside the bodies of our ancestors. We trust their bones will hold our weight. I have been always looking up, as if the answer is embossed in copper sheets of western clouds, December smithing spearheads in her flaming forge (you know the light). But here, I am beginning to look down. I have begun to wonder if disintegration is the kiln of unimagined, wilder day.
V. I am of sand and salt unmade, of breath in bone, and when my tears are spent they leave two slipshod lines like calcite mountain trails. How long since you have washed me clean of sin? How long since earth was not just canyon, since the sacrifice was made in plague and blood, the calf was toppled in the mud, the water slicked and shiny, cut with golden dust? The switchbacks in these hills are sliced and raw, not unlike ripened necks, and dry as bones bleached bitter in the sun. Do you remember knowing your whole body had been knit together, molded clay and mottled blood and needle-bones? Do you remember milk and honey, promised lands afloat on liquid mirrors in the sun? What is it that sustained me when the crevice turned up dry? What hope sees clouds above and prays for rain? These stones are stones alone, and song is sparse. I trust no more, my God, to foolish hearts. VI. Their fingers are five-pointed stars, are light- ning-knuckled, webbed, peninsular, fault-lined, meandering in veiny pathways, folded, propped, a rest for weary heads of clouds. And now, the flesh torn from them by the wind, they scrape the sky in desperation, then in adoration. Yes... they are the same. Have these already lost the thought of fruit and days of overflow? It seems so now – that purple clamp of clouds is crushing all the sweetness from a blushing patch of sky. Their limbs bend low before the gale. The winter here is not a kindly breed of praise. I stay awake in vain, my heart unkempt and courage quailed, the bread of anxious toil like lead within my belly, not a thought of exultation: only far-off wars. Oh let me sleep before you now, Beloved, so embraced within the living earth, as you awake within these darkened forms. Oh let me leave behind me, branch of Branch and vine of Vine, pretense of tallness, thoughts of allness. Set a watchman in my bones. VII. The rising bend of seeds and souls in concert, outline of eternities like waves and currents on the land, so rooted and so easily uprooted: therefore, precious in their picked-clean pods. The finches mob the blackened prairie cones. They flit between the stalks like children at the backend of the potluck table, seeking out the sweetest morsels. Each will carry sheaves in its bejeweled belly, warmth to radiate the frigid rush of snowy wind. What is it like to feel the warmth arise within from such a fragment found, a pure delight in pure potential, innocent of fruit in hand? Thus I will sit under the beaks of wiser birds than I, and shelter in the lee against a thistle-thrusting gale, and read the runes of bromes and flow'rets bright. The smallest of all things can grow beyond the ken of any man, beyond the savage kingdoms of our quaking world, and yes: so far beyond the shame I carry in the deep parts of my frame. So take and eat, I hear the goldfinch say: the feast is now, and will outlast the winter. Light is nigh. VIII. A puzzle pieced of sand and worn-down stones from quarried cliffs, a mountain humbled low to make a way, a valley raised to road. You walk in uttered wakes of long obedience, the clouds a vapored witness to your wordless wanderings. You notice only empty air in every footless print, the old and dusty evidence, the arrow pointing on. This is the longest road a man could walk with nothing on his back beside the restless thoughts of one long-schooled in Scripture, navigating by decree. The voice of God has spoken, and the Word leaps from the page. It waxes luminous and animate, each woven thread upon the next, a layered line traversing time and space impossible to follow end to end, and all you have to guide you through these heaven-haunted vaults besides the blank immensity of lonely choice is her, so pregnant with this ancient light the path before her blooms with blessing unforeseen. IX. O smitten star-kin, burden-bellied skies, ye edge-worn seas, recalcitrant in motion: move! O mountains, jutting skeletal, ye forests stark against the growing light, ye rebus thickets, shifting sands: behold! The yawning jaws of latch and door have swung upon their hinges. Watch your heads. Bring honor in among the lowly, be brought low, be broken open, let your brokenness be broadcast like the seeds within you sown. The overshadow of the Light that colors all has cracked this world wide open like an egg. Yet even so, I cannot turn my granite heart, so silent in its sheath, as though entombed. Can any thing created be so truly touched, here at the blazing center of itself? O Embryo of all things spoken, open this decision unto me, as beggarly and broken as I am, and needy beyond creeds. X. Displaced upon such streets of milling wills, the wanderers from half a million spillways here converge, and I am standing still along the edge of congregations, hordes I cannot hope to understand, and watching through the shrinking window in my shrinking hand. I turn. I long to touch the face of one familiar, to embrace the shoulders I have measured every day, to hear them say a welcome wider than my shame and broader than my loneliness. He walks beside me still, this one who left the home he knew to carry burdens never sought. So we are lonely in the crowd, and lost for words, the pressure building in our hearts to gather homeward once again. But here, a homely house above the terminal compresent bodies, staffed by warmth and light. The window, glowing brighter than the chaos, looks within to craggy faces grinning over bread and beer. A rough-hewn tune (if such a jagged line could so be called) springs up from deep within someone, and bubbles out, and somewhere in the back: a shout. XI. Outside these stable walls the stars still spin, the winds sweep mankind's dust into its piles. The seas are rolling over, heaping shattered glass on shattered shores; the mountains crumble, rise again against our eyes. The trees all raise their hands with widened eyes to hush the sky and squirrel secrets in their hearts. The fields rejoice, the roads luxuriate upon the land, the gates lift up their heads. The people suffocate themselves in action, wrestle through the night, and cling to air. Is there a bit of room for me, beside the lamb, or nestled back-to-back against the bristle-headed mule? I need so little, naught but straw to cover up my coldness, naught but bantam light through splintered panes, and only hopes of sweet collapse beside the forms of simple creatures, stirring slow. I have gone long without these tender mercies, but tonight, I would receive them. Yes, tonight, I would be open-eared to every cry. Tonight, here, I would rest within the wideness of this tiny, quiet place and seek a home beside the manger wrapped around the mirror of a tiny face. XII. Enrobed in flesh and sinew, you arrive. You always come to me in ways I never understand, in violence, incense, mud, and pain. How lucky that you do, for I cannot escape these mysteries no matter how I try. I wake to them in still and solemn hours, before the dawn begins to trickle down the scarlet carapace of the horizon – then, from fitful dreams I wake, from orbit 'round my failures, cloaked in gravity, into these daily deaths. The watchwords of our world are burdensome and few, the longest nights spent cataloging every inward ache before the stars wink out. But what is this awakening within? A murmuration of the heart that flutters steadily upon my breast. Here in the rhythm of your slumber, I discover hope, all nestled in anew among the empty places of my body, like a seed in fertile soil. Beyond the winged visions, as the watching eyes recede, I find you magnified enough to hold all things together in the dark, where now I realize you've always been. How far you've come, O Little One, to touch your mother's face. How far you've yet to go.
"Far out beyond the edge of cosmic wreck,..." all the way to "how far you've come to touch your mother's face." Chris, this was an awe-filled, tumultuous and beautiful journey. You truly have a gift. Thank you. I'll be sitting here in wonder for awhile.