The Stream & the Sapphire Read online

  SELECTED POEMS

  ON RELIGIOUS THEMES

  Contents

  Foreword by the Author

  I The Tide

  Human Being

  Of Being

  The Avowal

  ‘The Holy One …’

  ‘I learned that her name was Proverb.’

  A Calvary Path

  Candlemas

  Angus Dei

  Flickering Mind

  On a Theme by Thomas Merton

  Standoff

  On the Mystery of the Incarnation

  Variation on a Theme by Rilke

  Psalm Fragments (Schnittke String Trio)

  Suspended

  The Tide

  ’In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being’

  The Beginning of Wisdom

  Altars

  To Live in the Mercy of God

  Primary Wonder

  II Believers

  Poetics of Faith

  St. Peter and the Angel

  Caedmon

  The Servant-Girl at Emmaus

  Conversion of Brother Lawrence

  Dom Helder Camara at the Nuclear Test Site

  The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich

  Annunciation

  III Canjectures

  On the Parables of the Mustard Seed

  What the Figtree Said

  A Heresy

  IV Fish and a Honeycomb

  Salvator Mundi: Via Crucis

  On a Theme from Julian’s Chapter XX

  Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell

  On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus

  St. Thomas Didymus

  Ascension

  NOTES

  Foreword

  Included here are poems from seven separate volumes, the earliest dating from 1978; and although the sequence is not wholly chronological it does, to some extent, trace my own slow movement from agnosticism to Christian faith, a movement incorporating much of doubt and questioning as well as of affirmation. Other poems imagine historical personages (e.g. St. Peter, Caedmon, Brother Lawrence) or with some temerity attempt to enter as deeply as I could into crucial events of the New Testament. This enterprise in what I think of as do-it-yourself theology seemed at the time of writing to risk presumption, but I later discovered it was much like what Ignatius of Loyola recommended in the ‘Exercises.’

  The raison d’être for such a selection, along with a companion volume of ‘nature’ or ‘ecologically concerned’ poems is a demand from quite a few readers for a compact thematic grouping of poems which were originally published in various separate books. I don’t really like segregating poems, and there are so many (mine and others’) which overlap in theme or resist all categorization; yet I have to acknowledge that when reading on somewhat specialized occasions (e.g. at a rally for some peace and justice cause, or to a group of ecologists, or at a spiritual retreat) I have picked out the poems which seemed most relevant—and to do so has involved inconvenient hopping from book to book. This volume is conceived, then, as a convenience to those readers who are themselves concerned with doubt and faith and, though they read a wide variety of poems, like to have a focussed single volume at times, to stuff in a pocket or place at their bedside.

  — Denise Levertov

  PART ONE

  The Tide

  Human Being

  Human being—walking

  in doubt from childhood on: walking

  a ledge of slippery stone in the world’s woods

  deep-layered with wet leaves—rich or sad: on one

  side of the path, ecstasy, on the other

  dull grief. Walking

  the mind’s imperial cities, roofed-over alleys,

  thoroughfares, wide boulevards

  that hold evening primrose of sky in steady calipers.

  Always the mind

  walking, working, stopping sometimes to kneel

  in awe of beauty, sometimes leaping, filled with the energy

  of delight, but never able to pass

  the wall, the wall

  of brick that crumbles and is replaced,

  of twisted iron,

  of rock,

  the wall that speaks, saying monotonously:

  Children and animals

  who cannot learn

  anything from suffering,

  suffer, are tortured, die

  in incomprehension.

  This human being, each night nevertheless

  summoning—with a breath blown at a flame,

  or hand’s touch

  on the lamp-switch—darkness,

  silently utters,

  impelled as if by a need to cup the palms

  and drink from a river,

  the words, ‘Thanks.

  Thanks for this day, a day of my life.’

  And wonders.

  Pulls up the blankets, looking

  into nowhere, always in doubt.

  And takes strange pleasure

  in having repeated once more the childish formula,

  a pleasure in what is seemly.

  And drifts to sleep, downstream

  on murmuring currents of doubt and praise,

  the wall shadowy, that tomorrow

  will cast its own familiar, chill, clear-cut shadow

  into the day’s brilliance.

  Of Being

  I know this happiness

  is provisional:

  the looming presences—

  great suffering, great fear—

  withdraw only

  into peripheral vision:

  but ineluctable this shimmering

  of wind in the blue leaves:

  this flood of stillness

  widening the lake of sky:

  this need to dance,

  this need to kneel:

  this mystery:

  The Avowal

  For Carolyn Kizer and John Woodbridge,

  Recalling Our Celebration

  of Georqe Herbert’s Birthday, 1983

  As swimmers dare

  to lie face to the sky

  and water bears them,

  as hawks rest upon air

  and air sustains them,

  so would I learn to attain

  freefall, and float

  into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,

  knowing no effort earns

  that all-surrounding grace.

  ‘The Holy One, blessed be he, wanders again,’ said Jacob, ‘He is wandering and looks for a place where he can rest.’

  Between the pages

  a wren’s feather

  to mark what passage?

  Blood, not dry,

  beaded scarlet on dusty stones.

  A look of wonder

  barely perceived on a turning face —

  what, who had they seen?

  Traces.

  Here’s the cold inn,

  the wanderer passed it by

  searching once more

  for a stable’s warmth,

  a birthplace.

  ‘I learned that her name was Proverb.’

  And the secret names

  of all we meet who lead us deeper

  into our labyrinth

  of valleys and mountains, twisting valleys

  and steeper mountains—

  their hidden names are always,

  like Proverb, promises:

  Rune, Omen, Fable, Parable,

  those we meet for only

  one crucial moment, gaze to gaze,

  or for years know and don’t recognize

  but of whom later a word

  sings back to us

  as if from high among leaves,

  still near but beyond sight

  dra
wing us from tree to tree

  towards the time and the unknown place

  where we shall know

  what it is to arrive.

  A Calvary Path

  Where the stone steps

  falter and come to an end

  but the hillside rises

  yet more steeply,

  obtruded roots of the pines

  have braided themselves

  across the path to continue

  the zigzag staircase.

  In times past the non-human —

  plants, animals—

  often, with such gestures,

  intervened in our lives,

  or so our forebears

  believed when all lives were seen

  as travellings-forth of souls.

  One can perceive

  few come here now—

  it’s nothing special,

  not even very old,

  a naive piety,

  artless, narrow. And yet

  this ladder of roots

  draws one onward, coaxing

  feet to become

  pilgrim feet, that climb

  (silenced by layers

  of fallen needles,

  but step by step

  held from sliding)

  up to the last

  cross of the calvary.

  Candlemas

  With certitude

  Simeon opened

  ancient arms

  to infant light.

  Decades

  before the cross, the tomb

  and the new life,

  he knew

  new life.

  What depth

  of faith he drew on,

  turning illumined

  towards deep night.

  Agnus Dei

  Given that lambs

  are infant sheep, that sheep

  are afraid and foolish, and lack

  the means of self-protection, having

  neither rage nor claws,

  venom nor cunning,

  what then

  is this ‘Lamb of God’?

  This pretty creature, vigorous

  to nuzzle at milky dugs,

  woolbearer, bleater,

  leaper in air for delight of being, who finds in astonishment

  four legs to land on, the grass

  all it knows of the world?

  With whom we would like to play,

  whom we’d lead with ribbons, but may not bring

  into our houses because

  it would soil the floor with its droppings?

  What terror lies concealed

  in strangest words, O lamb

  of God tbat taketh away

  the Sins of the World: an innocence

  smelling of ignorance,

  born in bloody snowdrifts,

  licked by forebearing

  dogs more intelligent than its entire flock put together?

  God then,

  encompassing all things, is

  defenseless? Omnipotence

  has been tossed away, reduced

  to a wisp of damp wool?

  And we

  frightened, bored, wanting

  only to sleep till catastrophe

  has raged, clashed, seethed and gone by without us,

  wanting then

  to awaken in quietude without remembrance of agony,

  we who in shamefaced private hope

  had looked to be plucked from fire and given

  a bliss we deserved for having imagined it,

  is it implied that we

  must protect this perversely weak

  animal, whose muzzle’s nudgings

  suppose there is milk to be found in us?

  Must hold to our icy hearts

  a shivering God?

  •

  So be it.

  Come, rag of pungent

  quiverings,

  dim star.

  Let’s try

  if something human still

  can shield you,

  spark

  of remote light.

  Flickering Mind

  Lord, not you,

  it is I who am absent.

  At first

  belief was a joy I kept in secret,

  stealing alone

  into sacred places:

  a quick glance, and away—and back,

  circling.

  I have long since uttered your name

  but now

  I elude your presence.

  I stop

  to think about you, and my mind

  at once

  like a minnow darts away,

  darts

  into the shadows, into gleams that fret

  unceasing over

  the river’s purling and passing.

  Not for one second

  will my self hold still, but wanders

  anywhere,

  everywhere it can turn. Not you,

  it is I am absent.

  You are the stream, the fish, the light,

  the pulsing shadow,

  you the unchanging presence, in whom all

  moves and changes.

  How can I focus my flickering, perceive

  at the fountain’s heart

  the sapphire I know is there?

  On a Theme by Thomas Merton

  ‘Adam, where are you?’

  God’s hands

  palpate darkness, the void

  that is Adam’s inattention,

  his confused attention to everything,

  impassioned by multiplicity, his despair.

  Multiplicity, his despair;

  God’s hands

  enacting blindness. Like a child

  at a barbaric fairgrounds —

  noise, lights, the violent odors—

  Adam fragments himself. The whirling rides!

  Fragmented Adam stares.

  God’s hands

  unseen, the whirling rides

  dazzle, the lights blind him. Fragmented,

  he is not present to himself. God

  suffers the void that is his absence.

  Standoff

  Assail God’s hearing with gull-screech knifeblades.

  Cozen the saints to plead our cause, claiming

  grace abounding.

  God crucified on the resolve not to displume

  our unused wings

  hears: nailed palms

  cannot beat off the flames of insistent sound,

  strident or plaintive,

  nor reach to annul freedom—

  nor would God renege.

  Our shoulders ache. The abyss

  gapes at us.

  When shall we

  dare to fly?

  On the Mystery of the Incarnation

  It’s when we face for a moment

  the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know

  the taint in our own selves, that awe

  cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart:

  not to a flower, not to a dolphin,

  to no innocent form

  but to this creature vainly sure

  it and no other is god-like, God

  (out of compassion for our ugly

  failure to evolve) entrusts,

  as guest, as brother,

  the Word.

  Variation on a Theme by Rilke

  (The Book of Hours, Book I, Poem 4)

  All these images (said the old monk,

  closing the book) these inspired depictions,

  are true. Yes—not one—Giotto’s,

  Van Eyck’s, Rembrandt’s, Rouault’s,

  how many others’—

  not one is a fancy, a willed fiction,

  each of them shows us exactly

  the manifold countenance

  of the Holy One, Blessed be He.

  The seraph buttress flying

  to support a cathedral’s external walls,

  the shadowy ribs of the vaulted sanctuary:

  aren’t both—an
d equally—

  the form of a holy place? —whose windows’ ruby

  and celestial sapphire can be seen

  only from inside, but then

  only when light enters from without?

  From the divine twilight, neither dark nor day,

  blossoms the morning. Each, at work in his art,

  perceived his neighbor. Thus the Infinite

  plays, and in grace

  gives us clues to His mystery.

  Psalm Fragments (Schnittke String Trio)

  This clinging to a God

  for whom one does

  nothing.

  A loyalty

  without deeds.

  •

  Tyrant God.

  Cruel God.

  Heartless God.

  God who permits

  the endless outrage we call

  History.

  Deaf God.

  Blind God.

  Idiot God.

  (Scapegoat god. Finally

  running out of accusations

  we deny Your existence.)

  •

  I don’t forget

  that downhill street

  of spilled garbage and beat-up cars,

  the gray faces

  looking up, all color

  gone with the sun—

  disconsolate, prosaic twilight

  at midday. And the fear

  of blindness.

  It’s harder to recall

  the relief when plain

  daylight returned

  subtly, softly,

  without the fuss

  of trumpets.

  Yet

  our faces had been upturned

  like those of gazers

  into a sky of angels

  at Birth or Ascension.

  •

  Lord, I curl in Thy grey

  gossamer hammock

  that swings by one

  elastic thread to thin

  twigs that could, that should

  break but don’t.

  •

  I do nothing, I give You

  nothing. Yet You hold me

  minute by minute

  from falling.

  Lord, You provide.

  Suspended

  I had grasped God’s garment in the void

  but my hand slipped

  on the rich silk of it.

  The ‘everlasting arms’ my sister loved to remember

  must have upheld my leaden weight

  from falling, even so,

  for though I claw at empty air and feel

  nothing, no embrace,