Shape and Substance

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The makers rage to order words of the sea
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

– “The Idea of Order at Key West”
Wallace Stevens
Selected Poems (2009, p. 74).

I. The Charnel House, St. Catherine’s Monastery (i)
A thousand skulls. Two thousand sockets
keep eternal watch as aimless dust
settles to its rest for a millennium,
or for the twinkling of an eye—does it matter?
They observe all, these vacant sentinels,
miss nothing, make no comment.
The jaws of monks that once gave voice
to liturgy and psalm now fall agape,
sing monotonic praise of none, or else of all.
The song they sing is the silence of angels.

Above, in Trypho’s chapel, impious feet
grind smooth the ancient doorway sill
that leads to sunlit sacred precincts.
Icons commend with pious gesture
axioms of order and orthodoxy,
censers exhale holiness in swaths,
and incanted chants are unguents for the chafe
of doubt’s ubiquitous anxiety.
A sideshow. The true penitent
treads the garden path to see the bones.

In these chambers darkness is the Truth.
Here silence is the single testimony,
and generations of the dead enforce
without a word the piety of patience.
Here among these skulls intrudes no doubt,
for death is past and pain is ended,
and faith dissipates into the acrid dust.
Brothers who once struggled to believe
are here beyond belief’s combative grasp.
Here at the end of things is the beginning.

II. The Thirty-Two-Foot Principal
When called for, or at the organist’s discretion,
at the end of lines, or when otherwise the melody
pauses, as though gathering itself before
plunging on to whatever denouement awaits—
in those moments of blessed silence there lingers
a shaking in the rafters, a rattling in panes.
Foundations quake, assumptions rearrange.
The thirty-two-foot principal, low C.(ii)

Neither note nor sound, but wave, a cosmic rumble,
as if the bowels of earth are in distress,
as if somewhere not all that far away
a newborn thunderstorm is forming,
as if it has just occurred to the Eternal
that one could draw a breath to speak a word
that might become the jussive of creation’s grammar
and separate the darkness and the light.

Low frequency high amplitude vibrations
seem to the ear like mountains made of air;
we rise and fall on surging tidal swells
of sound that is not sound but something more.
Between compression and rarefaction
lies the Truth, and in the Truth, the Trust
that sunk below the deep abysses of the sea
are the footings of the pillars of the world.

III. The Cry of Merlin (iii)
The oldest stories say he was a Druid,
last of his pagan race, murderous and wild;
no cuddly muddle-headed magic-maker,
tamely Christian, caster of the silly spells
of fairy tales—No, he was primordial,
thane of storm and thunder in dark forests,
of ancient oaks and rocks belched up from deeps,
a soul expressed in acorn and in lightning.
He traveled by an older way, a way obscured
lest it confound, confuse, or contradict
accepted truth. It was a way that made a world.

Walk in the wood—if you can find one—and listen
to the voice of oaks and rocks and wind;
tune your ear—do you hear it?—to a cry
that rises from below the vaults of time.
Imprisoned in a castle made of air, he cries
a cry still heard but never understood;
and tears of trees and ache of stone and poetry
of breeze and gale all bear the cry away
beyond the far horizon until it reach our shore.
Not all things are known, not all stories told.
Not every path abandoned is forgot.

IV. Kidney Stone
Long past midnight my belly fire burns hot,
and I believe in no one, not even God.
There is just the stone, and the stone is all that matters.
It aches and pulses deep, is its own universe
where no ministration salves or soothes or settles.
It moves, and bends my being to its will;
it rests, and I breathe gratitude for its mercy.
It is small, I am told, will likely pass;
here is medication to dull the pain and ease
the passage from hard-edged night to softer day.
But it is mine, this stony burden; I made it
in dark recesses I choose not to see,
and I have borne it, though unwittingly,
preparing for an anguish of my own creation.
Should not its passing be my doing, too,
unaided, unanesthetized, and alone?

Alchemists once sought the Philosopher’s Stone,
the stuff of myth that, found and properly applied,
turned ordinary metal into gold or silver,
could make one wise, pry open Eden’s sword-stopped gate,
could limn the very path to God.
It is a lifelong quest, to pick the lock
that binds Pandora’s treasure chest and rifle
through her gems in search of hope.(iv)
A certain tilt of spirit is required—
a surrender of dignity and pride of place—
to bring the stone to life and then to light,
where its passing might yet work a transformation,
and change our baser mettle to rarer earth.

V. Church Basement
Children’s desks and chairs
not so much arranged as thrown together
and left to tumble down,
furniture in a wooden waterfall
pooling into dust. On either side
the hallway proffered rooms
stacked floor to ceiling with the stuff,
the detritus of bygone decades
rotting in the semi-darkness.
Above, in the sanctuary, good folk of faith
still walked the aisle and sidled into pews,
sang hymns, prayed prayers as liturgy instructed,
and gave their ears to preachers, more or less.
Not down here, though. Down here
the dust alone was witness, mute record
of memorized verse, recited psalm,
stories from Egermeier or Uniform Lesson.(v)
Once classrooms, they were now a mausoleum
unvisited, a grave untended, overgrown.

Even that is gone now. In its place
a fast-food joint catering to drive-in
impulse, the cravings of our day. Still,
I wonder if beneath the tire and tarmac
there might remain a teaspoon of the dust,
and in the long silence after-midnight,
and audible with more than just the ear
the witness of the dust might yet be spoken
below the words, in the basement of belief.

_____________________________

Author’s Note: I offer these five poems as a sort of informal cycle. Each of them stands on its own, I think, but taken together they suggest (I hope) something of my yearning to get beneath the noise and foolishness that seems to me to characterize life and language—both personal and (for me, at least) ecclesial. The title I have given to this cycle suggests that they are best described as an excavation—a “dig” in the archaeological sense of that word—and as an exhumation—a “digging up” of whatever may be buried and out of sight. I don’t think of these as finished reports of completed work, either of the archaeologist or the medical examiner; rather they are field journals and autopsy notes from ongoing labors. I do not yet know what I will find down there, wherever I seem to be going.

______________________________

Notes on the text:

(i) St. Catherine’s Monastery is located in the Egyptian Sinai at the foot of Jebel Musa (reputedly Mt. Sinai, where Moses received the Ten Commandments) where it has been an active community of the Eastern Orthodox tradition for nearly 1500 years. Because of both limited space and arid conditions, generations of deceased monks are encrypted until their flesh has desiccated, and then their bones are placed in the charnel house, a structure in the monastery garden devoted to preserving the remains of the faithful. The charnel house is situated beside and slightly downhill from St. Tryphon’s Chapel.

(ii) The 32’ Principal is the lowest stop on most pipe organs. The lowest note on the pedal board of most organs is a C.

(iii) According to most of the early Arthurian legends, Merlin’s death came as the result of a spell cast over him by his paramour, Nimue (or Niviene, in some versions). Merlin was eternally imprisoned in a castle made of air that no one could see (alternatively, the prison was an oak tree, a cave, or a large stone). Waking from the spell but unable to free himself, Merlin recognizes and accepts his fate, except that he utters a heartrending cry in a language no one understands. According to some versions of the story, the cry was so loud that it could be heard for two miles, and all who heard it were reduced to tears.

(iv) “Pandora’s Box” was actually more likely a pottery jar than a wooden box. Hesiod’s treatment of the Pandora myth in his poem “Works and Days” uses the term, pithos, “jar”, but Desiderius Erasmus elected to render the term into Latin as pyxis, “box,” giving rise in the West to the tradition of “Pandora’s Box.” In most versions of the story, Pandora releases a host of evils, afflictions, and catastrophes on humankind when she opens the box, but she manages to keep locked inside one thing: hope. Whether this is a tragic or a promising symbol remains a matter of interpretation.

(v) Egermeier’s Bible Story Book, by Elsie Egermeier and Arlene Hall (1955), was a staple in most Protestant children’s Sunday School rooms and in many family homes. Egermeier’s retold biblical stories from both testaments in ways deemed both understandable to children and palatable to the sensitivities of post-World War II American parents. The Uniform Lesson Series was a Sunday School publication of the Presbyterian and Reformed tradition that featured (in its children’s leaflets) realistic art renderings of scenes from a particular text and a retelling of that text in—again—understandable and palatable language.

There were questions
I had never thought to ask
while you were here,
questions of ontology and teleology
I do not know how to answer.
Why must I wash my supper plate
in soap and hot water when to the naked eye
a wipe and cold rinse suffices no less well?
Why must I make the bed
when I have slept only on my side
and left yours undisturbed and will sleep again
in the same little hollowed nest
tonight and tomorrow night and the night after?
Why must I dry the shower walls
with that raveling towel you threw
for the purpose over the glass door
if tomorrow I will wet them once again,
and mold is no less a living thing than I?

I searched for answers
in all the standard reference works:
the photos on the mantle,
your dresses hanging in the closet,
the way you stacked the pots and pans
in the cabinet beside the stove.
For a moment, I thought I’d found them
behind the dog’s brown eyes
when he put his paw on my knee
while I was sitting in your chair,
but he was only wondering
when dinner would be served, and afterward
lay down on the rug across from the door
that leads to the garage, his nose pointed
in the direction of your anticipated arrival,
where he proposes to remain
in case you return.

Distant January in a nameless hotel room.
Lying sleepless yet again and wondering why.

Moaning filtered through the stucco’ed wall.
Such agony, I thought, and too well known,

overheard the way you cannot help but hear
some pounding rap or furious Beethoven

through closed car windows from the next lane over,
as though I were worthy party to his pain.

Thin walls, I thought annoyed, and yet still curious,
listened on, until it seemed that I was hearing

keening of a different sort, a stranger music,
the kind that only lovers make. More insistent,

he began to build a slow crescendo…
with silence for a coda… and then another sound,

this one open-throated, higher in the register
as though the urgent theme were taken up

by another voice. Hers a freshened melody,
she called his name again…again…again…

his only counterpoint was silence until
at last the two began to sing together,

wordless duet, the ancient song our race
has always sung. The wall began to thump

with the headboard’s rhythm. I could feel
percussion now, and my own heartbeat

fell into the pace, matched their accelerando
as we strained toward the climax, all cries

and yearning, until the pinnacle was gained…
cries waned to denouement… and then to silence.

I held my breath, but nothing more:
the buzz of random voices down the hall,

and a thickening sadness in the dark
rising like a fog inside my soul.

Why has it lingered all these years, this grief
in every hotel room, at every bedtime?

I realized my knees were shaking—and
I was standing—and my ear was burning;

had I pressed it so long against the wall?
My hand trembled as I lifted to my lips

my now-cold cup of coffee, a nightcap tinctured
with the salty savor of my tears.

Blood runs in the streets.
Where shall we place the blame
when blood is blood, and death is death?
We descend into the flame.

“Abandon hope, ye who enter.”
We did that long ago, it seems.
Lucifer is our landlord;
we mortgage our bedraggled dreams.

Rage is our handmaiden
and violence our chosen part.
We know these paths; the weary way
from Ferguson to Charlotte

and on, God help us, on and on
to killing fields as yet unknown.
Shoot first and question later
is the moral of the gun.

When we look into each other’s eyes
and see their hate or fear,
is it not our own reflection
that seems to us most clear?

It is early yet

It is early yet,
daylight a distant music,
dream that was and might yet be,
pendulum between antipodes
of night.

It is early yet,
Cold-sharp wind excises
necrotic yesterday. Tomorrow bleeds its way
to birth, newborn and squalling,
a day.

It is early yet
to divine the way
to limn the shape of pleasure, pain,
to hear the melody of fear or faith, and so
I hope.

Dawn

The slow diminuendo of the dark
begrudges its retreat ere grows the dawn;
while playing at the edges of the night
a cold grey light, at first more hint than song.

Come, daystar, swell to bright crescendo,
echo the rhythmic pulse of ancient way,
as darkness cedes to scarce imagined morning
its load of ache, its hope for coming day.

The Question of the Sun

Cling you to the night?
There is shelter in the comforts of the dark,
where vision dims, and slumber’s anesthesia
slows the beat of pain in mind or heart.

Let go. Release the night. Let go.
These ancient rhythms you will not gainsay.
Dawn’s rays bring even Morpheus to his knees.
Leave darkness to the dead, and greet the day.

And Comes the Sun

Look!
Grey silhouettes the dark horizon,
presses on the borders of the morning;
with each moment bolder comes a-borning
new light, new possibilities arising.
Brighter: from each rosy-fingered ray
emerges urgent orange and vermillion
until reluctant clouds dilate, unwilling,
and night gives birth to glory. Soon the day.

Sing!
Join hawks and doves and sparrows;
toll the ancient tune, song of Helios.
Approaches now the chariot of Eos.
No reticence, no comfort left in shadow.

Awake!
The Wheel has turned another turn,
And we? We are the stowaways who borrow
this vessel of tomorrow and tomorrow…
See! It is the dawn, and comes the Sun.

She lived, so say geneticists,
a hundred thousand years ago—
or perhaps a quarter million—who knows?
Somewhere in East Africa—Kenya, Tanzania,
maybe not too far from Olduvai?—
she stirred and stretched and somehow knew
in the way women know, the way
her mother before her knew, the way
women have always known when morning
penetrates the veil of cloying night,
that there was a changeling in her belly.
The evening’s passionate coupling
had joined two X chromosomes
to make a womanchild.

How does it feel to stand at future’s edge,
to watch the distant morrow dawn, to bear
in folded moistened darkness of her womb
along the sinuous paths of the double helix
the same X-chromosomal messages
that will make us you or me?

How does it feel to bear the hope—
unspoken, unimagined—
of every daughter and daughter’s daughter
who will ever henceforth wake,
stir and stretch and struggle through the dark
to believe the morning sun?

How does it feel to know in ways unknown
the serpent must yet disturb the garden,
murky portents bode both pleasure, pain,
blood will not stay safe within the vein
but stain the ground and water hidden roots until
they bear a bitter fruit?

Arms held tight across her breasts
against the morning chill, still shuffling off
night’s anesthesia, she looked around
for a morsel yet uneaten, a bite to fuel her body
and her half-remembered dreams, not hers alone
but of the thousand thousand generations
at that moment wakening inside her, opening
hungering eyes to see the darkness,
hungering mouths to taste the emptiness,
hungering minds to learn the weal and woe
of living in this world. Let us call her
Mitochondrial Eve, mother to all mothers,
our Most Recent Common Ancestor.
We all are one in her.