“They did not desire to speak with these things; but they wished them to hear and obey what was said to them.  The Entwives ordered them to grow according to their wishes, and bear leaf and fruit to their liking; for the Entwives desired order, and plenty, and peace (by which they meant that things should remain where they had set them).”
-J.R.R. Tolkein, The Two Towers

Suffice to say, I relate; but things don’t often remain where one sets them.

What it is I want to say I am not certain.  It is composed of fragments, that somehow or other are unified in my thoughts, but I don’t quite know how to bring them out as a coherent whole, to make you see them as I see them.  The wild yellow circles of a butterfly in the field last week, the rain that puddled in the yard today,  the old man in the church in Tennessee who yesterday slipped me a peppermint just as he used to do when I was eleven years old. 

I finished Marilynne Robinson’s Home last night, and it made me cry as few books ever do — I often tear up over books, but the tears don’t usually trickle down my face, I don’t usually sniffle and sob.  Robinson writes of a broken world, but she shows the places where that brokeness is beautiful.  Isn’t this what Christians ought to be about?   We can’t hide all of the cracks and torn places of the world, and God is the only One who can make perfection.   We cannot restore every lost thing or make every scar vanish, but we can point to those losses and those scars, and point to the God who makes even losses and scars beautiful.  

And so I look out on a world of weeping, where there is more news of death than of life, more news of losses than of gains.  Wars and words that wound and sickness and separation.   And will You, God, make even this good?  And will this be beautiful, in the end?  Ah, yes, the ugliness that there has been will only make us see the beauty that much more.   And we will be glad.

As Robinson says, at the close of her book, “The Lord is wonderful.”

“. . . and the breezes that came in were mild, earthy, grassy, with a feel of sunlight about them.”  -Marilynne Robinson, Home

And I was glad, very glad, to read such a sentence; glad to have someone tell me that breezes can have “a feel of sunlight about them,” because it was a thing I’d suspected and not been able to articulate.   But I have been made glad also by leathery-black water-bugs skimming on top of the shallows, by a Very Large Turtle poised in the sunlight above his perfect reflection, by a note in the warm green mailbox, by a walk in the moisty-cool morning, by a few moments at the piano with Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and by other things besides. 

Oh, fear the LORD, you his saints,
for those who fear him have no lack!
-Psalm 34:9

glimpses

*Two blue and black butterflies slowly beating their wings on the brick porch outside my window.

*Water drops hanging on the ends of pine needles, making the trees sparkle.

*Thunder echoing back and forth across the Mississippi hills.

*Lamplight.

*A black  cat purring on the bed behind my head.

*The extraordinary greenness of things on days that are damp and gray.

*The quiet of a clean room.

*Grace.

being pearled

       On the impulse of a morning, I yesterday put five poems into an envelope and sent them off, with an appropriate letter of introduction, to meet the editors of a magazine.   Likely they’ll come back to me in a month or two, with a typed encouragement to introduce them to other people — someone might like them!  (Maybe I’m scarred from last summer’s rejection slip: a pale green half-sheet bearing a medieval woodcut of Salome receiving John the Baptist’s head onto a platter and beginning with the admonition “Don’t lose your head –”  Editors ought to learn tact.)  
       In any case, as though in acknowledgement of my sacrifice of poems, the mailbox today produced a volume of poetry for me: Luci Shaw’s Water Lines.  (In point of fact, no longer having a college library outside my back door, I ordered the book last week to encourage myself to write.)   It is a slim volume, with a simple beige cover, and the poems on its pages are familiar to me, for I used to read them from the library copy at school, and, before that, read them in the volume a friend loaned to me.  (It was the week I had my wisdom teeth out, and I don’t believe I absorbed much of the poetry then.  Mostly, I remember the clean, herbal, soapy smell that particular volume carried.)  And so this afternoon I carried my book through splotchy sunshine under trees to a chair on a porch beside a pond, and there I sat, and there I read.
       For me, to read poetry is to be still, perhaps more still than in anything else.  Other reading carries you in one direction or another; you follow an argument or a story line.  But in poetry, the best way is to sit and let the images wash over you.   Though the poem is familiar, each reading brings something new: the way the drips gather and catch light before falling off the tip of your nose; some image filling a wrinkle that, last reading, you didn’t have; the pattern of water spots on the front of your shirt.  The poem allows you to experience an instant of time in slow motion, to feel each particle of the splash, to see each glint of light, to think of all of the associations that came and went with the moment.  I slow down when I read a poem; breathe deeply; come away refreshed.
       And so, of course, I have now to share a poem with you.  It is not my favorite in the book; no, I had not noticed it really, until today.  But today I noticed, and call it good:

Conch

Its open mouth corresponds
to your own hunger to hear.
Rough as the bleat
of gulls, its edges
rasp your cheek, cold as salt;
the surge of sound floods
into your own convoluted
shell of an ear
through tympanum, stapes, cochlea.

You lean into the roar — a tide
of air and water trapped
at the shell’s pink, helical heart –
an ocean tumbled over
and over.  Breath still moves
on the face of the deep;
you ache to its
tempest at your cheekbone.
And the inside tremor — the thunder,
the wave that breaks over
more than your bare feet.

Listen deep until it owns you.
Know the whole world
a shell, and you the grit
caught in it, being pearled over.
-Luci Shaw, Water Lines, 2003