up within tall towers
of learning, steeples of discourse.
Bells in her spirit
rang new changes.
Swept beyond event, one longing
outstripped all others: that reality,
supreme reality,
be witnessed. To desire wounds—
three, no less, no more—
is audacity, not, five centuries early, neurosis;
it’s the desire to enact metaphor, for flesh to make known
to intellect (as uttered song
makes known to voice,
as image to eye)
make known in bone and breath
(and not die) God’s agony.
3
‘To understand her, you must imagine…’
A childhood, then;
the dairy’s bowls of clabber, of rich cream,
ghost-white in shade, and outside
the midsummer gold, humming of dandelions.
To run back and forth, into the chill again,
the sweat of slate, a cake of butter
set on a green leaf—out once more
over slab of stone into hot light, hot
wood, the swinging gate!
A spire we think ancient split the blue
between two trees, a half-century old —
she thought it ancient.
Her father’s hall, her mother’s bower,
nothing was dull. The cuckoo
was changing its tune. In the church
there was glass in the windows, glass
colored like the world. You could see
Christ and his mother and his cross,
you could see his blood, and the throne of God.
In the fields
calves were lowing, the shepherd was taking the sheep
to new pasture.
Julian perhaps
not yet her name, this child’s
that vivid woman.
4
God’s wounded hand
reached out to place in hers
the entire world, ‘round as a ball,
small as a hazelnut.’ Just so one day
of infant light remembered
her mother might have given
into her two cupped palms
a newlaid egg, warm from the hen;
just so her brother
risked to her solemn joy
his delicate treasure,
a sparrow’s egg from the hedgerow.
What can this be? the eye of her understanding marveled.
God for a moment in our history
placed in that five-fingered
human nest
the macrocosmic egg, sublime paradox,
brown hazelnut of All that Is—
made, and belov’d, and preserved.
As still, waking each day within
our microcosm, we find it, and ourselves.
5 Chapter Thirteen
Why did she laugh?
In scorn of malice.
What did they think?
They thought she was dying.
They caught her laugh?
Even the priest—
the dark small room
quivered with merriment,
all unaccountably
lightened.
If they had known
What she was seeing—
the very
spirit of evil,
the Fiend they dreaded,
seen to be oafish, ridiculous, vanquished—
what amazement! Stupid,
stupid his mar-plot malevolence!
Silly as his horns and
imaginary tail!
Why did her laughter
stop? Her mind moved on:
the cost, the cost,
the passion it took to undo
the deeds of malice.
The deathly
wounds and the anguished
heart.
And they?
They were abashed,
stranded in hilarity.
But when she recovered,
they told one another:
‘Remember how we laughed
without knowing why?
That was the turning-point!’
6
Julian laughing aloud, glad
with a most high inward happiness,
Julian open calmly to dismissive judgments
flung backward down the centuries—
‘delirium,’ ‘hallucination’;
Julian walking underwater
pilgrim of the depths, unfearing;
twenty years later carefully retelling
each unfading vision, each
pondered understanding;
Julian of whom we know
she had two serving-maids, Alice and Sara,
and kept a cat, and looked God in the face
and lived—
Julian nevertheless
said that deeds are done so evil, injuries inflicted
so great, it seems to us
impossible any good
can come of them—
any redemption, then, transform them …
She lived in dark times, as we do:
war, and the Black Death, hunger, strife,
torture, massacre. She knew
all of this, she felt it
sorrowfully, mournfully,
shaken as men shake
a cloth in the wind.
But Julian, Julian—
I turn to you:
you clung to joy though tears and sweat
rolled down your face like the blood
you watched pour down in beads uncountable
as rain from the eaves:
clung like an acrobat, by your teeth, fiercely,
to a cobweb-thin high-wire, your certainty
of infinite mercy, witnessed
with your own eyes, with outward sight
in your small room, with inward sight
in your untrammeled spirit—
knowledge we long to share:
Love was his meaning.
Annunciatión
‘Hail, space for the uncontained God’
From the Agathistos Hymn,
Greece, Vle
We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book; always
the tall lily.
Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.
But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage.
The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent.
God waited.
She was free
to accept or to refuse, choice
integral to humanness.
_____________________
Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.
More often
those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.
_____________________
She had been a child who played, ate, slept
like any other child—but unlike others,
wept only for pity, laughed
in joy not triumph.
Compassion and intelligence
fused in her, indivisible.
Called to a destiny more momentous
th
an any in all of Time,
she did not quail,
only asked
a simple, ‘How can this be?’
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel’s reply,
perceiving instantly
the astounding ministry she was offered:
to bear in her womb
Infinite weight and lightness; to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power—
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.
Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love—
but who was God.
PART THREE
Conjectures
On the Parables of the Mustard Seed
(Mathew 17.20, Mark 4.30—32,
Luke 13.8—19)
Who ever saw the mustard-plant,
wayside weed or tended crop,
grow tall as a shrub, let alone a tree, a treeful
of shade and nests and songs?
Acres of yellow,
not a bird of the air in sight.
No, He who knew
the west wind brings
the rain, the south wind
thunder, who walked the field-paths
running His hand along wheatstems to glean
those intimate milky kernels, good
to break on the tongue,
was talking of miracle, the seed
within us, so small
we take it for worthless, a mustard-seed, dust,
nothing.
Glib generations mistake
the metaphor, not looking at fields and trees,
not noticing paradox. Mountains
remain unmoved.
Faith is rare, He must have been saying,
prodigious, unique—
one infinitesimal grain divided
like loaves and fishes,
as if from a mustard-seed
a great shade-tree grew. That rare,
that strange: the kingdom
a tree. The soul
a bird. A great concourse of birds
at home there, wings among yellow flowers.
The waiting
kingdom of faith, the seed
waiting to be sown.
What the Figtree Said
Literal minds! Embarrassed humans! His friends
were blushing for Him
in secret; wouldn’t admit they were shocked.
They thought Him
petulant to curse me! —yet how could the Lord
be unfair? — so they looked away,
then and now.
But I, I knew that
helplessly barren though I was,
my day had come. I served
Christ the Poet,
who spoke in images: I was at hand,
a metaphor for their failure to bring forth
what is within them (as figs
were not within me). They who had walked
n His sunlight presence,
they could have ripened,
could have perceived His thirst and hunger,
His innocent appetite;
they could have offered
human fruits — compassion, comprehension —
without being asked,
without being told of need.
My absent fruit
stood for their barren hearts. He cursed
not me, not them, but
(ears that hear not, eyes that see not)
their dullness, that withholds
gifts unimagined.
A Heresy
When God makes dust of our cooling magma,
musingly crumbling the last
galls and studs of our being,
the only place we can go if we’re not
destined for hell, or there already,
is purgatory—for certainly heaven’s
no place for a film of dust to settle;
and I see no reason why purgatory
may not be reincarnation, the soul
passing from human to another
earth-form more innocent—even to try
the human again, ablaze
with outsetting infant wonder—from which
to learn, as expiation progressed,
neglected tasks.
Then
the sifting again, between thoughtful fingers,
the rubbing to finer substance.
Then perhaps
time for the floating
into light,
to rest suspended
mote by silvery mote
in that bright veil to await
the common resurrection.
PART FOUR
Fish and a Honeycomb
Salvator Mundi: Via Crucis
Maybe He looked indeed
much as Rembrandt envisioned Him
in those small heads that seem in fact
portraits of more than a model.
A dark, still young, very intelligent face,
a soul-mirror gaze of deep understanding, unjudging.
That face, in extremis, would have clenched its teeth
in a grimace not shown in even the great crucifixions.
The burden of humanness (I begin to see) exacted from Him
that He taste also the humiliation of dread,
cold sweat of wanting to let the whole thing go,
like any mortal hero out of his depth,
like anyone who has taken a step too far
nd wants herself back.
The painters, even the greatest, don’t show how,
in the midnight Garden,
or staggering uphill under the weight of the Cross,
He went through with even the human longing
to simply cease, to not be.
Not torture of body,
not the hideous betrayals humans commit
or the faithless weakness of friends, and surely
not the anticipation of death (not then, in agony’s grip)
was Incarnation’s heaviest weight,
but this sickened desire to renege,
to step back from what He, Who was God,
had promised Himself and had entered
time and flesh to enact.
Sublime acceptance, to be absolute, had to have welled
up from those depths where purpose
drifted for mortal moments.
On a Theme from Julian’s Chapter XX
Six hours outstretched in the sun, yes,
hot wood, the nails, blood trickling
into the eyes, yes—
but the thieves on their neighbor crosses
survived till after the soldiers
had come to fracture their legs, or longer.
Why single out this agony? What’s
a mere six hours?
Torture then, torture now,
the same, the pain’s the same,
immemorial branding iron,
electric prod.
Hasn’t a child
dazed in the hospital ward they reserve
for the most abused, known worse?
This air we’re breathing,
these very clouds, ephemeral billows
languid upon the sky’s
moody ocean, we share
with women and men who’ve held out
days and weeks on the rack—
and in the ancient dust of the world
what particles
of the long tormented,
what ashes.
But Julian’s lucid spirit leapt
to the difference:
perceived why no awe could measure
that brief day’s endless length,
why among all the tortured
One only is ‘King of Grief.’
The oneing, she saw,
the oneing
with he Godhead opened Him utterly
to the pain of all minds, all bodies.
—sands of the sea, of the desert—
from first beginning
to last day. The great wonder is
that the human cells of His flesh and bone
didn’t explode
when utmost Imagination rose
in that flood of knowledge. Unique
in agony, Infinite strength, Incarnate,
empowered Him to endure
inside of history,
through those hours when He took to Himself
he sum total of anguish and drank
even the lees of that cup:
within the mesh of the web, Himself
woven within it, yet seeing it,
seeing it whole. Every sorrow and desolation
He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.
Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell
Down through the tomb’s inward arch
He has shouldered out into Limbo
to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber:
the merciful dead, the prophets,
the innocents just His own age and those
unnumbered others waiting here
unaware, in an endless void He is ending
now, stooping to tug at their hands,
to pull them from their sarcophagi,
dazzled, almost unwilling. Didmas,
neighbor in death, Golgotha dust
still streaked on the dried sweat of his body
no one had washed and anointed, is here,
for sequence is not known in Limbo;
the promise, given from cross to cross
at noon, arches beyond sunset and dawn.
All these He will swiftly lead
to the Paradise road: they are safe.
That done, there must take place that struggle
no human presumes to picture:
living, dying, descending to rescue the just
from shadow, were lesser travails
than this: to break
through earth and stone of the faithless world
back to the cold sepulchre, tearstained
stifling shroud; to break from them
back into breath and heartbeat, and walk
the world again, closed into days and weeks again,
wounds of His anguish open, and Spirit
streaming through every cell of flesh
so that if mortal sight could bear
to perceive it, it would be seen
His mortal flesh was lit from within, now,
and aching for home. He must return,
first, in Divine patience, and know
hunger again, and give
to humble friends the joy
of giving Him food—fish and a honeycomb.
Lent 1988
On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus
It is for all