All Good Becoming – a poem by S.D. Carpenter

All Good Becoming

“…in a vision I beheld the fullness of God’s presence encompassing the whole of creation….And my soul in an excess of wonder cried out: ‘This world is pregnant with God!’” — Angela of Foligno

This could get weird
And kind of icky.
To think The Big One With The Beard
Is curled inside the rounded belly 
Of a woman sitting on a park bench. Is He She They
Yahweh
A mover, a roller, active and kicky,
Or slothful in the wholesome jelly? 

It is a mite less strange to conceive
The infinite thickens the spider
Lurking in the petals 
Of the dahlia, that fuchsia one. 
Or lodges in the buried acorn, future mother of leaves. 
To the perspiring workers on the roof installing solar panels, 
The Omnipotent Provider
Bursts forth as sunlight, the offspring of nuclear fusion.

God,
Here I am
Making light of the divine
(And for the damn
Purpose of a slant rhyme).
Should I attempt to manifest the cryptic 
Meaning of the mystic,
Or will my labors—profane at best, mundane at worst—prove flawed?

The astonishing vision 
That visited Angela—
Our small world overflowing with something like
Boundless dominion—
Was totally indescribable, an experience not unlike
Profound vertigo of the soul,
Whose insight exceeded her ability to parcel a
Neat explanation and render whole. 

If not what then how? 
Hers was the narrow:
To bow
Lower than worms and stones, 
To admit
Her savior, whose holy fire disjointed her bones
And enflamed his passion in their marrow,
And to suffer it

Gladly, the indeterminate sludge of doubt and grief,
Our worldly desolation. Hell,
Her radical devotion prompts our disbelief. 
Take her reverent care of lepers
And that time she drinks one’s putrid 
Wash-water and avers
Its taste wondrous, as pleasing as communion wine. Was all well 
With her mind? Or was she beyond lucid, 

Embodying a wild,
Ecstatic faith in the eternal
Coherence of love,
Whose depths, neither below nor above,
Flower in the flesh, 
Desiring to deliver each and every thing from conditional
Being to becoming: inviolate, fresh,
And reconciled?

S. D. Carpenter was born and raised on the Llano Estacado in Texas. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Texas Tech University and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. She currently works as an assistant director at a research data archive for the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Her writing has appeared in Pleiades.