INDEX TO AWE

No maladjusted word will fix the hurting heart,
nor solemn vows we read, nor spoiled reekings we bark.
It is no saccharine face a masterpiece could recompose
from its dull swirling ashes – no misdemeanor’s portal,
nor the finely finessed outline of precious shells in a cave.
Out of our dung, we make no substitute for love.
No grapevine situation of sin is solved by tracings,
no matter the avid reason we add to it in our storminess.
The light that comes to spirits meanders to them unsold,
ripe for the bickering over qualities and virtues –
the last good things we land on, so rarely on our toes.

Yet the toes dig in, indeed as if the earth were not yet born
or itself a burgeoning cursor pointing to some fabulous
end of worlds – worlds we knew, worlds we forswore,
worlds we got bottle-lost, drained of anthem and key.
At times, even, we were flayed by the very peace
in vain we’d sought; by all the harried needs that failed us.
All that we construed, word after word, ignorant
there was a source unseen, underneath, facilitating
all those peeks into waking, all those rappels into dream, –
a heave sui generis emboldened into each
unworthy human host, the Subtender so pleased with life
each got the whole of it, without ever getting it.
Only they sank and rose in time to what is wordless
and thus remains His One Perfect Speech
whose healing waters alone absolve their anxious futility.

Recipients of a charism, filled with the grandeurs of God,
they chase down the grace of an existence never their own,
no matter how amazing the bestowal from on high.
Yet there they were: where the last good things glow and find
a home – in the limitless abode of heaven on the sly.