Fundament of Place: Fire

Stove fire is a fundament of their place

and they treat it as it exists outside of prayer.

The equinox light has time; finshed

John's relations with hard-starved fields

cold and gray, damp and fallowed.

The new November moon in its place named

for John's radished hips, Sara's winsome plaits.

John spans the gatepost door and

slippers slump-tired from shaping line posts.

He smells like sap resin, old pine smoke

and damp wool. Sara fingers the salt

and shifts her weight to the stove door.

She has prayed all day as if to say

"I love him me some." Left foot walking

"Jesus." Right foot walking "Mercy."

He has worked at wordless things all day.

Blemish and rot has not yet defiled our land. 

Her cisterns are full of fresh water, the turn 

of the white hand is ready. She will satisfy herself

with honey from the comb, their marriage

bed is not far -- reaching into their table's grace.

Insides of slapped cinder wood, the coal-tipped poker,

the soft explosions and mushroom blooms

of resin layered saps and epigrammatic sparks. 

Sara smiles with plates of roasted

venison, loose floured hair, beaded

important breasts, leavened to be

the warp and weft of a busy examin.

What does it mean to love the

material at hand, the worthiness

unacknowledged except with kisses,

calming winds, and falling into grace,

and cold baptism of gifted meats,

The promises hidden and unhidden

in the yeasty meats of love, the

resting before the planting, the

stovewood prayers of expected joy.

Sara suppers the stove, and John drinks his 

tired dreams: "Can this damp wood fuel

maintain the heat to burn?"

Sitting with Zoloft

All Saints Day 2010

Shuttered down in the shadow of Christ. My 

haunches like the rotted quiescense of overripe fruit 

mistaken for joy and bowled offerings yet to be made.

Mostly lonely out of ignorance and spent shame;

The split familial ghosts of trembling; dancing a 

mated shuffle. He says, Go in two pieces to love.

The weeping loop of my mouth and standard earshot

distance welcomes the three warped arrows and the Holy

feather of anger spent like masturbation and broken rays.

Lonely-- no longer in my heart. --I am learning the

because-of brain, and more to the point, what must

be the wayward made straight to my original face.

As green ash grows against the white willows, so

the streams of my rolling walk and flopside breaks make

penetrations of old-timey sing-song notes. A keening.

Wishing; as if just a half-side beef spine truck-hooked

to the breakdown tables. My arm is found to be broken. 

So fair and dimpled along the back side and end of you.

Down face to a friend and into the whipping horse he was

fond of for making steamy saints and pentagons of sinew,

Tree to  grow and pendants of penetrating joy.

A major tree of arcana is disjointed at the bastion

and intersection of artificial and angel bodies. It is like

unto boning and tearing flesh, abandonded, burnished ache. 

I sing to him like a verger and the fleshed story is something

lost.-- A bright photonic and salvaged love. I do not leave my bones.

Peace be with you. Held at the edges and thrusts of sharpened knives.

Fermata Liturgics

Low vaults of streams, rills and washes

attend the special attraction of nymphs, flies, 

and streamers. You rise at the presentation

unaware to the slenderest tippet of choice.

The leaded dawn of the overreaching cast

snags our local tongue, and we are downed

as only the best lord of me is counted as cost

again. Lost again without so much as an erection

or scrying tent of our urgent mouth. We

rise to bait as words, and fall to water 

as impotent fodder before the radished hips

that curl towards hope sprung eternal.

Shame on me. I am lost to fisherfolk and fail

the catch. The morning prayer's Canticles of

Mary are sponge bait for bottom feeder me,

blood stink and solons of marked thick water.

In the water, barrenness holds. Your bare

feet on the lowboards. Begin again. Begin

again. Begin the high rolling casts. Throw

the presentations again. Thummin odds.

Redeem this cast in the dark. 

I have nothing to set before him, 

but there is the asking, the rebuilt

altars, the loosening of creation.

Figuration

She hips through hoary vetch and sedges, damped

leggings and morning calling. Fall canes, big bluestems

attempt a plait in her ashen hair. The switchgrasses 

wet her chest, cold and breeching into the southwind.

Strands of whisper-smooth sumac freights the east,

and chill finds wind cupped against her wet breasts.

Roughed, tickclover beds she has crowded into with

eyes downcasted and careful not to trip.

Her purchased prairie is kept with tears, sap, scratch

blood and smear. Her field glasses hang useless, cast

in the fog of the fall. The stick and twig scraped shins

are skippered into black locust falls and hedge balls.

Stepping to stone and snag, linting wet nicks accross 

her neck. The filagree of flat seeds in the wet creases

of her sleeves and pants legs. A white plane climbs

above her and her dogs return to pant and caress.

Curator of syntactic chunks of sound

Men in suits are born in the way crows stalk and speak

behind the mullions of glass walls and dust motes. Three crows

study my gaze as they gruff through  the dull saturated hues

of smoked glass at dawn and through chevrons of resting moths.

Please; no more hope from me. The gift is not befriended here.

Agnostic breathing moistens the hall-dutied glass at the early of the day.

This lecture hall dries the tongue and the heart. Three

brothers forage the track practice fields every morning. 

Their dew dredged meats cannot hop, cannot skip, and

cannot fly. Even katydids are stropped into submission.

They are frozen like locked odors and the vacant eyes

of students. Sudden of the hunted stare, the gaze and

The panic of sophomore girls on Friday mornings 

amidst the tired teachers hoping to have no hope. 

Fragment 2

We observed him walking

his voice did not quaver

enough to break us near.

The gaze of us is slight

and peripheral to his glasses.

The syllable chant of oral

word work is the initial

attraction. We leave rods and

staffs to find theatrical sounds.

He is not relevant to the muse

we serve. Her hounds do not

let us rest along the

Steep, larched roadway.

Postscripted from his prayer

of specialized rationalization,

and his instinct for preventing

the colony collapse of our bees.

Fragment

Her voice we hear as dictionary speak when she hunts the field

One of us knows her as a thesaurus would chant her diction.

She moves upset. These things must happen to people.

She talks left foot "Jesus," and right foot, "mercy."

A siren call for us. Perhaps the blood pump

of her heel and toe, heel and toe praying 

is the same call of her setter bitches pointing scaled quail

in the scrub brush north of the BurMac blacktop.

Eight hours with her and no confession was heard

Other than the quick guilt of the downed birds.

The table grace of fine grained game and sauced roots

Is mostly enough to give us our leaving, once so called.

Writing poems in the 3rd person.

Mostly because the confession, the anecdote, the bit, the sketch, the salient observation, the spectacular moment, and the winning argument seem like political campaigning. Much as the church and the clerisy might un-church and dis-inter themselves to the edges, much as the plaque of psychotherapy has channelized and dredged faith from rivers, much as the faithful demand the vote, much as the officer class has refused to lead; their work is not the craft of community.

These selfish poesy memes are somewhat, sometimes arch, and camp, and beautiful, even as they are not much more than sophistry veneered with sonic trickery. At their best they can be seen as prayers, meditations and contemplative strokes of searchers, mongers and saints.

Micro memoir poems are mostly what I have written. They do not seem much more than Facebook status. Trolling for empathy, crafting the bait of affirmation cum jealousy. What is the affirmation required of the beautiful and the truth. Broken beams. Dropped breasts. Ambulances and Hearses. 

Is it a re-enchantment to write in the voice of a seraph? An archangel? A private dick? Surveillance and the gaze of the voyeur are powerful trophes. What if the interior life of the object is mis-understood by the narrative voice of the poem? Is the voice of the poem received as revelation?

Insurrection as wedding march

The task today does not lie in some naive attempt to return to the early church. The church before Constantine. The church before Platonic philosophy. The church before Paul. The church before... For these moves fail to bring us back far enough. 
Rather we must call a new army of agitators into being. Dissidents courageous enough to return to the event that gave birth to the early church. A new breed of individuals brave enough to turn back so as to advance.

Peter Rollins

Heart leaps where followers cannot go.

After praying through the events of each day, inquistive as to the task of situating a Triune God, in the events of my behavior -- leaving aside the heresy that we can go and do where God is not-- I am beginning to take serious the following observations.

1. Operating in my head and with focused attention, I can lead a seminar, workshop, and classroom in the way that it needs to go, and successfully push what needs to be pushed and rest what needs resting. 
2. My instinct is to overule the focused attention/intention and lead where my curiosity leads. This often has the result that my audience is lost, confused and distrustful. I seem to do this most often in my classroom at school.
3. Classrooms are "captive." They are not paying participants in the same sense as a workshop or seminar. Sometimes my desire for student engagement results in an impromptu performance piece, that while entertaining, does not advance the learning my students need. The classroom becomes an audience for me to "show-off." Not good.
4. My ability to "perform" and tell a story is pretty good, and should be deliberately practiced.
5. If I let my heart get engaged while in a position of "leader" in a class-to-parish sized community, my heart makes leaps, detours, surrealist disconnects, non-sequitors, enjambments, verbal puns, and off-the-wall connections that cannot be "followed" by the majority of those present. 
6. This disjoinment is a species of the oft-discussed fundamental estrangement of the poet and artist from the community of trusting that each member is enough like the other so as to be trustworthy with spiritual/emotional honesty in community. I am usually very sceptical of the so-called artistic temperment because an artist must have an audience. 
7. I don't believe that I am being intentionally rude to my audience, I sometimes cannot control my oral impulses and my mouth runs amok. It has the effect of being rude, but the intention is simply my naive curiosity at the pursuit of what gives me pleasure. It is selfish, and talent is no excuse for selfish.
8. Communities of believers, students, learners and seekers are tolerant of outsiders, but the trust required of leadership of these types of inter-and intra-personal communities is often jeapardized by the selfish whims and diction of the leader. 
9. What the leader says is not as important as what the audience hears. A leader must say and do what the audience can and will hear. A poet, not so much, but a poet without an audience is not a poet.
10. A community needs to trust that their leader is working for their interests and that the leader is NOT using the community for his own intellectual stimulation.
11. My leaps of the heart, the experience of which tends to shut learning communities down, often lead to my feelings of being alone, odd, eccentric, too "out there" and "other."
12. At the same time, these leaps are the most precious and beautiful things that I create. These connections are the poetry, the art, the worship that I create. In them I feel I am most alive, most creative, most inspired and most likely to experience Beauty, Truth and Love/joy.
13. When I have to shut my heart down in order to lead a small community, I get bored.
14. When I am leading, and I am bored, I have to resist the impulse to drop poetic word bombs that shutdown the process, stop participation, and set the members all atwitter with energies that do not serve to take them where they need to go.
15. There is an edge that I can work that asks the members of a community to expand their thinking, but when I get bored, and I don't maintain my teacher discipline,  I get a rush from pushing them too far and too fast, but then I feel remorse and distance.
16. I have learned that I can discipline my curiousity and impulsivity so as to not "hijack" the conversations and that my own promiscuity with ideas can live without being sated. I used to believe I could not.
17. I can discipline my obsessive compulsive tendencies to expand too fast and maintain the edge of creative energy that is effective for the community I am leading.
18. This discipline while required for classroom, seminar and workshop, is not strong enough for parish ministry as parish priest.
19. I do not find energy and passion in building communities and keeping them together.
20. I do find energy and passion for building audiences for my performances, but I am too afraid of the "other," but have been too afraid of being an "other" forever, and wanting to have it both ways: as an insider trustee, and an outsider prophet.
21. To risk performing the leaps that engage my heart the community/audience must be very large or very intentionally created. Out of a large group, some will follow and the rest will be mildly entertained. But their expectation is to be entertained and stimulated, not to learn how to be a better xtian. Think in terms of dioceses, regions, social networks, and communions. In that larger group there is an audience for whom my heartwork is not too "other" so as to be alien, exile, and unheard prophet.
22. It is probable that I will need the imprimateur of "deacon" to be accepted as authority in the Diocese, communion, social networks and region.
23. The teacher voice is leadership of smaller groups in the question, "Where do you find God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in this artifact." This is class, workshop, seminar, and lecture.
24. Aesthetic artifacts, not nature, but man-made, made special, creation of hands, attempts at aesthetic intention, liturgy, worship modalities, architecture are all objects for scrutiny and curatorial effort.

From the religious sacrifice to the sacrifice of religion

From the religious sacrifice to the sacrifice of religion

Very Lovely

Division of Plait by Andrej Remnjov

http://www.detweepauwen.nl/en/artists.asp?ArtiID=47&NavID=gene

Idols and the culture of death

Perhaps this ordination hunt is really just jumping the shark for another idol from the principalties and powers of death. Perhaps this "I am worthy" standard was given to me by well-meaning elders, prophets, ministers and priest simply because of my precociousness, my promiscuity with god talk and my ability to master diction registers. Perhaps this contested space is just one more vain and egocentric project to prove worthiness of salvation, redemption and working it out.

Deacons seem either tired, arrogant or co-dependent.

Priests seem to be burnt embers on the way to ash.

Perhaps the baptised teacher, poet, farmer, & humanist is worthy enough.

The meditations on the baptism of Jesus and the well-beloved son are making the rounds instead of the oft-mentioned "feed my sheep" schtick. 

Perhaps, the baptised version of the order given me as a child to preach, to correct, and to prophesy is to let that idol go.

Semi-final thoughts on ordination of Deacons and Priests

Be it therefore resolved, the following assumptions.

1. All persons cannot keep themselves from worshipping god. We are homo-liturgicus.
2. Priests, rectors, pastors, bishops are bound literally and figuratively to a specific community of worshipers for a specific time and in a very specific place we call church and parish.
3. Deacons are not likewise bound to a community, time and place, but are commissioned to "special ministry" that gives many opportunities for self-definition, one-on-one, and outside of parish missional operations. The temporalities of a parish are not given a deacon, nor should a deacon act as if they were.
4. Full and equal order thinking would suggest that a deacon could be elected bishop without being ordained presbyter as an intermediate rung.

Here then is the contested space. A rector, vicar, priest, bishop is enmeshed in the relationships of worship. A communicant is attracted to intimate worship of god by the various ways a priest presides, a communicant runs away in fear from worship when it gets too much. All worshippers are engaged in this dance of get close, pull back, get close, pull back. The attractions and the repulsions are a dance of intimacy. It is a dance. The priest must always be a willing partner, must be rejected and re-loved, love again and be rejected over and over. A priest must interpenetrate and impose their ministry into the intimate relationship of worshipper and that which is worshiped. Priests must articulate the right ordering and the right enjoyment of the worship of God to the Father, through the Son, and with the Holy Ghost.

The inescapable frustration of being a dance partner and being the owner of a rejected dance card  request is the lot of a pastor. This frustration is force multiplied by deacons who have the blessings of bishops to cut in and re-order the worshipper's enjoyment of god. A priest must have a dance card meeting with everyone in the parish, good dancers and bad. A deacon chooses who to dance with, what the song is, and why it is to be enjoyed. 

Where a deacon and a priest are interested in the same worshippers, they must co-disciple, the dance cards must be coordinated, the steps of making clear the claims made on lives (discipleship) must be mutually groked, and made transparent.

From this train of thought, these conclusions.

1. Deacons in parish ministry are problematic and must be carefully scrutinized to make sure that conflicting discipleship actions are rooted out like the plague.
2. Every ordained person in a parish must have a dossier of discipleship actions for each worshipper and an agreed upon plan of right action at the right time for each communicant. This is akin to a sales prospect list.
3. The cycle of dance partner, rejected dance partner, re-newed dance parter of priests with their parishioneers must be acknowledged, discussed, healed and brought into blessing. 
4. Priests must be able to inter-penetrate a person's worship dance and a deacon must stay out of that within a parish.

My sisters

P1010147.JPG, originally uploaded by cloudykid.

We are blessed.

Grandson's Beauty

IMG_2485.JPG, originally uploaded by cloudykid.

Pray for the protection of the innocents. Pray to St. Clare on her feast day.

A Collect for the Presence of Christ - Bryan Sherwood

A Collect for the Presence of Christ -


"Lord Jesus, stay with us, for evening is at hand and the day is past; be our companion in the way, kindle our hearts, and awaken hope, that we may know you as you are revealed in Scripture and the breaking of bread. Grant this for the sake of your love. Amen."

For some reason tonight, when I asked that we read this aloud collectively, a catch of emotion caught my throat and a tearing up at the "stay with us." Fidelity to place and the theology of body.

John 21:1-22 - Passage Lookup - King James Version - BibleGateway.com

John 21:1-22 - Passage Lookup - King James Version - BibleGateway.com: "John 21:1-22 (King James Version)

John 21

1After these things Jesus shewed himself again to the disciples at the sea of Tiberias; and on this wise shewed he himself.

2There were together Simon Peter, and Thomas called Didymus, and Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, and the sons of Zebedee, and two other of his disciples.

3Simon Peter saith unto them, I go a fishing. They say unto him, We also go with thee. They went forth, and entered into a ship immediately; and that night they caught nothing.

4But when the morning was now come, Jesus stood on the shore: but the disciples knew not that it was Jesus.

5Then Jesus saith unto them, Children, have ye any meat? They answered him, No.

6And he said unto them, Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and ye shall find. They cast therefore, and now they were not able to draw it for the multitude of fishes.

7Therefore that disciple whom Jesus loved saith unto Peter, It is the Lord. Now when Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he girt his fisher's coat unto him, (for he was naked,) and did cast himself into the sea.

8And the other disciples came in a little ship; (for they were not far from land, but as it were two hundred cubits,) dragging the net with fishes.

9As soon then as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread.

10Jesus saith unto them, Bring of the fish which ye have now caught.

11Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land full of great fishes, an hundred and fifty and three: and for all there were so many, yet was not the net broken.

12Jesus saith unto them, Come and dine. And none of the disciples durst ask him, Who art thou? knowing that it was the Lord.

13Jesus then cometh, and taketh bread, and giveth them, and fish likewise.

14This is now the third time that Jesus shewed himself to his disciples, after that he was risen from the dead.

15So when they had dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my lambs.

16He saith to him again the second time, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my sheep.

17He saith unto him the third time, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me? Peter was grieved because he said unto him the third time, Lovest thou me? And he said unto him, Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee. Jesus saith unto him, Feed my sheep.

18Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.

19This spake he, signifying by what death he should glorify God. And when he had spoken this, he saith unto him, Follow me.

20Then Peter, turning about, seeth the disciple whom Jesus loved following; which also leaned on his breast at supper, and said, Lord, which is he that betrayeth thee?

21Peter seeing him saith to Jesus, Lord, and what shall this man do?

22Jesus saith unto him, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou me.

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

We are an exceptional model of the human race. We no longer know how to produce food. We no longer can heal ourselves. We no longer raise our young. We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon. We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us. We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived. But when the lights are off we are helpless. We cannot move without traffic signals. We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breast-feed our baby. We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life. And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life. We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand. We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us."

From Blood Orchid by Charles Bowden

Thirteen poems assembled

Three days from the Feast of the Transfiguration.

The thirteen poems for the chapbook are assembled. The title will need to be developed and a liturgical calendar supplanted.

There are three more poems to be included. However, the number 16 is troublesome, so perhaps three more will come and nineteen would be a goodly sum.