HELL, MARY
Hell, Mary, Fool of Grace The Low Road’s in thee! Based Art, thou, amongst women And based is the Fruit of thy Wound, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mutter of God, Play for us shimmers Now and at the flowering of our death.
A LATE-NIGHT CHRISTMAS EVE LETTER TO ST JOSEPH
When you labored your way back to your clan, Mary, your Mary, was already thick with child. Today, though, here in my father’s house, I can’t help but wonder not at her burden but yours: What weighed so heavy on you? St Luke, always sure of his work, says Caesar ordered all the world to be polled, everyone counted in their ancestral home— a policy so patently insane only a man convinced he’s a god could’ve ever become pig-headed enough to conceive it. As you neared the city (I know it was no little town for you) I doubt you gave any of that madness any thought, however. Nothing is as taxing as family, is it? Still, anxiety can’t be what silenced you. No, your quiet sheltered a secret, deep, and dangerous to every grief. So, although I don’t quite know to say it, I need you to pray for me if you can without saying a word.
A BLESSING FOR AN ASPIRING THEOLOGIAN
Lord willing, you will fall, not too soon, if all goes well wholly quiet dumbly adoring like the ox the one who makes your words straw to gild this rough winter manger.
LINES FOR A FRIEND
(after Reading Jacq. Maritain)
The angels that guard us, yours and mine, have been watching each other for the longest time seeing themselves as they see us and all that’s ours in the blacks of Jesus’ eyes. Swooning, arcing over us, bright with accomplishment, incensed at what we’ve suffered, quickened by the Father’s delight in our every aching awkwardness, they tremble with pleasure, knowing what we for now cannot: Leviathan is the proof of love. And yet, all this while, we’ve held, impossibly, a secret kept for them: Lucifer, first son of the morning, shall at last be changed— in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, choiring heaven’s hosts for the divine encore, without a doubt beside himself with joy. And then— all things shall swell in singing his song, the Psalm of the Evening, the praise waiting from before the rising of the worlds to be Song.
EPIPHANIES
How old is light? The oldest light? I’m told no lucent ever dies. Is that why the cosmos is ever- expanding, stretching out the curtains of its habitations, wide and wide? I am not wise. I know so little of the brightness. Who can measure the time it took for the fire of the mages’ star to cross the gape of the world’s black wound and fix their eyes? Could it be each at once felt the luminescence rise in the thick dark of their cradled heart? Could it be their faces shined? They must’ve dazzled like children.
You can read “Our Lady Calms the Four Horses of the Apocalypse” here.
