nuns and nudity.

I wonder about these saints

with their large dark eyes

and ever accompanying light.

It shocks me how they sit

so still, so composed

with their flagrant exposure

a curve a line a dot

and a swatch of cloth hanging forgotten

off their serene shoulders

lit in the light of their holiness

In the street I would turn away

attempt to minimize their shame

by covering them with my eyelids

drawing darkness over them like modesty

and yet they do not mind

they sit smiling the faint smile of the vindicated, the irreproachable

and i wonder if this is what it means to be a saint

to lose so much of humanity

that they may sit revealed

not as women, but mere flesh

wrapped around their secret being

something so foreign that to come close to it

these painters in their desperate courage

must strip them of all else but their glowing skin.

Reflection

I have seen you everywhere today

in the tense quiet face of the Western man

in leather clinging to the swinging reins

as his fall and his enemies place him

beyond all surgery

in the bronze boy stretched to his toes

with every small muscle taut and 

his quick ribcage tight against his skin 

as his stretching wings create for him a new shadow

and place it far from him

in the weary Greek boy just pushed into manhood

against the whitewashed expanse  of wall

clutching his stomach through his rough robe

as though his heart had broken

and he could not place the pain

in the crouching Hercules

with lion paws dangling from his cloak 

that cushions only slightly

the weight of the wide rimmed world

that creaks above him like an anchor

in the rounded suggestion of a man

reaching in his dusty red coat

for the hand of a woman who will not  reach back

he has no eyes to see

in the hard strong man who stands firm

determined against the pushing shadow

and against the weight of the crushing crowd

behind him, his family,

he supports his soft too-round wife

with the mere touch

of his elbow against her fingertips

I have seen you everywhere today

and in everyman

You have been old and young,

full of strength and sapped by fear.

The center and the shadow.

I have seen you in the staring child

who over his mothers shoulder

reproaches the world 

for the thought of separation, of loss

and i have seen you in the neat folded hands

and covered feet that the shadow stretches across

even as the shadow has already stolen away

the light from his lighted eyes. 

I have seen you triumphant, failed, 

a familiar face and a stranger.

I have seen you everywhere today

I have not seen you for three months, twelve days, and eight hours.

What a thief love is.

Plaza.

i found a photo of you 

hanging in its white frame

on the white wall

i know it is you because of how you sit

against your black chair

strong as if against a horse

that will obey if led

but strains against the ground, like a personal offense

I do not know the woman pushing you

her white uniform erases her

rendering her nothing but a shadow of sorts

the hidden engine of which we do not think

while driving our quiet stretches

I only see you, strong as always

on that debris littered field

and the shadow that stretches its hand

out towards you , like a greeting

from too far to yell and so we wave

and wave again

showing how strong

our young arms are

against the encroaching autumn

and you say nothing but sit

silent and strong across the unlevel ground

under the shadow of the marble Caesar

who raises his arm in salute.

We are one, we two, he says

strong and silent with the world, 

waiting to be led, beneath us

and white time pushing us

invisible and steady

towards our known end.

We go in strength.

Memori

the day of my death

i did three things

three things for you to remember

to remind you why we used our special pronoun

us

i organized the icecream in the freezer

in neat stacks

with their pint sized labels 

slid to the side so you couldn't read them

without squinting

and then i labeled them

the way you eat them.

"two in the morning-you can finish that paper"

on the double dutch chocolate

"life is still simple-look how you made it today!"

on the cookies and cream

"go buy more icecream. you hate this"

on the vanilla that neither of us eat.

 

i bought you a printer's worth

of photo paper

and three cartridges of ink

and eight scrapbooks

because you hate looking at computers

for too long

and kodak employees make you nervous

the way they flip through

your private moments to kill time

also a good black pen

to write notations without bleeding through

or splotching the page

which irritates you to no end

i underlined all the quotes

in my favorite book

that remind me of you

even though i know you insist

that you are nothing like him

that wild eyed rochester

with his heavy hand and stabbing wit

but still i insist with your careful love

your quick anger when i hobble myself

and your roaring declaration

that the world may stand against 

but i will be yours. and only. forever

rings through these pages too

i tuck it under your pillow 

i do these three things

on the day of my death

to comfort you, to remind you,

because this is the unspeakable crime

to divide us into i

and you, left behind

but remember this.

i will be yours. and only yours. forever.

on the day of my death

i do three things for you

and then one more

for me, and me only,

i watch the sunset quiet in my chair

and i do not call you

to say goodbye

i know you know i love you.

and i cannot say goodbye.

close the door behind you.

i opened the door to your room today

i just opened it.

there was no preparation

not a deep breath before

or a stiffened wrist to reach 

i stepped inside

your empty room

stepped past where your bed was

instinctively avoided the pile that always grew

to the right of your window

and adjust the curtains

i haven't changed them yet

i suppose i will

it would make a good library

this room that was yours

i walked into your room yesterday

and i realized it was my house again

all of it

Why I fear Asher Lev

I have written that he writes of revolution. and that is true

but he also writes of redemption, of the giving of the secret to repay the past.

This understanding strikes second, always second, after the clarion trumpets of the revolution have echoed into dusk, into dust. 

It comes after the ties have been broken, the chains shattered, and the very language of the oppressive truth forgotten.

It comes slowly, tasting of guilt first and then a bitter nostalgia.

How this redemption grows- in dreams, in sorrow, in the places where the wounds and wounded have died and forbear to walk again. 

Yet this is what he writes, He writes a resurrection.

The revolution is done.

It was strong and it may have been right but it is no more.

The redemption must come, coiling amidst the thoughts of the rebels, reminding them.

The reminder that spring is not the wealth of the world but summer-summer when the death has come and age has brought beauty again.

 How could they, revolutionaries that they are, ever escape the wealth that they were searching for, the burning strength that drove them away and draws them back so inexorably?

He writes of redemption but there is no mercy. 

This is a restitution, a repaying of wrongs, a righting of what was fallen and in it there is no grace. There is inevitability. 

So the story swells and so it always will for the root is in the ground and must always be so. No matter how the spindling seed may fly, swept away in the wind, that grasping gasping freedom, it must return to earth. It must make peace with the ground and so too these rebels, these revolutionaries, they must return, unwilling perhaps and grudging, but they return to the secret strength of their parents, the solid light that they fought against envelopes them and too their children.

This is the sacrifice,the peace offering, they must make-found in the faces of their children.

Their children who know only of freedom what we have taught them and only of fear what we have feared. 

How then to return to the place we have feared and say- 'freedom'. 

How to turn back on the far place to which we ran and point- 'fear'.

Yet this is what we must do upon our faces and hearts to rewrite the revolution-to be redeemed.

This is retribution, it is restitution that we surrender to truth and in our turn watch our children tear away from it hungry and angry.

For the wrongs we have given such sorrow we receive.

But this is right and fair and as we fall in the glaring truth so greedy for our solitary surrender we learn what it was to be left when we, the hungry and angry, led away the hopes of the old in captivity.

We learn then the truth of a revolution- a point on a circle must always return.

He teaches us this. and leaves us to grow.

Why I read Asher Lev jealously.

he writes a revolution every time

a revolution from something that may not be wrong, a revolution against something that may be right.

but regardless must be revolted against

because it is sure, so sure, of its own rightness

and how, how, can humanity bear that insufferable rightness

that intrinsic selfcontained orientation that declares all other compasses worse than obselete, it declares them nonsensical, irrelevant, nonexistent

they cannot and so build hate against it, sneak small weaknesses out under the curtain of our eyelids and then when free from the blaring glaring rightness of it all build the weaknesses into tragic flaws

into bitter breaking antiques of old answers held together by that most dirty of all religious words

fanaticism

the dirt of that word shocks the modern word, the blaise, unshockable world looks away in shame from this, unspeakable

the crime of the fanatic, the prosolyte, the believer without an advocate

because he simply believes that his rightness will prevail

and so we dirty it. we throw cynicism and charm at it, we pollute it with clever denigrations and attempt with wit to throw it enough in the filth that we may look at it

and in the midst of it there is a blazing confusion from the believer, that irreproachable inapproachable fanatic,

a confusion all the more irritating because it is mixed with a sort of distant pity pointed at us with our dirty hands

and there he stands with his glory of correct belief above us watching us with our sneering terrified faces trying to pull him down

and he wonders what we think, why we think that the fraility of man means anything against this immovable force that will noe be corrected, that will not be reproved, that will not even deign to be proved. but only is. and will be.

and so he stands and he falls and is covered in the mud, the soles of our filthy shoes, the gritty ink of our trashy newspapers commenting obliquely on the quaint traditions of these fools, these antique fools, amusing only as long as they are weak

and we become tired and wander away, unfulfilled

because though the man is broken and tattered and torn

that blazing truth sits like cement unable to be shifted

that is chaim potok