Soul-Letting
In the dark before dawn in the dripping ink of an autumn morning I ache and bleed these words trailing the star-born night echoing silently in my heart and every heart and what is this holy scratching, this sacred not-knowing leaning into mystery and how personal it all is even the cold air a few degrees away from frost and who knows what to make of the rain tapping gently on the windows streaking down as if to prefigure a wound or the shape of a woman bowing in prayer and I am the woman, I am the man, человек, a person of all of us united in cosmic freedom and suffering and I feel the rain as my sister, my brother in wonder and a single lit candle before the icon of Christ one of the most profound events ever happening now in the dark as I sneeze my head off with leaf stains on the sidewalks everywhere around this small holy burg in Nowheresville, America and the ancient root rot of the earth slowly turning into blessing and thanksgiving in tiny shrouds of Turin the world over and Lord, thou knowest—and what rife discordants come together somehow in unlikely matrimony like Meister Ekhart wrote in “When I Was The Forest”—and I am the forest as all debris come together even the broken bottle neck of a pint of Thunderbird thrown into a roadside ditch and I want to hold your hand as I did in Ames, Iowa circa the late eighties at a Rolling Stones concert with a girl whose name I did not know and would never see again though somehow this must be held in eternity as a tiny beacon of light shining forever for the innocence and joy of this brief holding that happened spontaneously and in deep accord with the Holy Spirit who is no keeper of time or space but all of it everywhere always here now at once in the midst of global warming and mayhem and the seething snakehood of viral lies spiraling out in digital madness, and though I walk through the shadows of a blinding Wal*Mart I shall fear no evil except for the evil emanating from my own middle-aged heart that for once (for once) craves healing and annulment of all of its desires except for the yearning to be simple and kind like an old lady who has nothing to give but a few nickels and laughs easily as in a Rumi poem and the widow’s mite made manifest in coins from the fish truck and then what is the world and what is the joy, what is this constant and unfolding banquet happening in the midst of record-breaking hurricanes and school shootings whose smoking shells fall to the linoleum floor of a first-grade classroom as one of my very own students emailed me saying she was taking the day off on the anniversary of her own school shooting she survived huddled and terrified under a desk a few years ago and how do you respond to this, what can you do or say—and what is a page, my love, what is a blinking cursor, how so much loveliness and beauty in the midst of so much suffering and we must be heirs to a sigh, to a whisper and a whimper and a moan and Aw, shucks delight and how easily I missed the two-foot put and the lay-up after a break away and how my cornhole bag slid right off the slanted board—but somehow everything comes back again, everything is meant and redeemed for holiness, I sweareth, and how manifest of glory and kingdom come I need not understand a single thing but wonder, wonder, and thanksgiving this early day in dark November to lean into this love and to cleave to it even unto death, I am ready, Lord, I am almost ready and given to trembling all over as befits your crude pot-hole creature, your faithful and clueless mut, a mercy upon a mercy upon a mercy and then an unraveling ball of yarn rolling where I can, where I must, reaching out to you once and for all and for always, my open hands now a pair of rising doves turning into flight headlong for the one true and only light opening above and inside us and bursting out into uncontainable awe.
Note: человек (Cello-vek) means person in Russian.
Robert Vivian‘s last book under his own name was All I Feel Is Rivers, though he did publish a novel last year under a pseudonym.
Amethyst Review 