What Isn't Love?

No one has ever read this poem.  There was a period in which I was obsessed with a woman.  It was a terrible, destructive, painful experience.

The woman enjoyed her power over me and used it to pull me in, push me out, toy with me.  She wasn't such a bad person.  She was simply in thrall to her own problems and the two of us constructed an awful parody of "love".  During that period I wrote several poems exploring rage, obsession and the difference between healthy love and obsessive love.  I chose to post this poem because I think such experiences are not uncommon.  Many of us have been through the agony of obsessive, jealous, manipulative and enslaving attachment.

What Isn't Love?

Staring into space at work,

while over and over you rehearse

something you must say to wound your lover.

Or having to replay

again and again throughout the day

some way that your lover wounded you.

Listening to the sound

of cars homeward bound;

to extend the range of audibility

farther and farther down the street,

parsing motor noise as you wait:

car too big, car too small,

how long will he or she be gone?

Wincing when your lover smiles

through a party's unheard talk

with a too-attractive stranger;

it feels so much like danger.

To miss someone is sweet,

but helplessness is bitter,

and love does not taste bitter,

rejection is the acrid morsel on the tongue.

Trying too hard to be good;

trying too hard to be bad;

trying too hard not to feel;

feeling too hard to try,

and wanting to cry

when you beg for love

as if it were a drug,

then moan in shocked surprise

when you don't feel high.

Yet you grow more passionate

with each betrayal.

What isn't love?

Heat without light;

lust without compassion;

compassion without passion.

No word exists for what isn't love

but it's always been around

in promises that are broken

in the language being spoken

by those who cannot hear

its splintered sound.

Look: A Poem About Missing And Finding Love

Look.

Look around you

at the people, so driven,

by a force

relentless as gravity

inescapable as day and night, life and death.

The power that winds us and grinds us,

makes us crazy is the hunger for love,

the search for love,  the absence of love,

the loss of love.

Its effects are everywhere,

visible, invisible,

pervasive;

in this landscape of loss

and loneliness

the search grips everyone

obsessive as a drug hunger

so intrusive and demanding

that we are not even aware

as it seeps into the air we breathe,

the molecules of our daily existence

have sponged it up

so that it becomes like the music

from the next apartment

or from a passing car,

a beat felt,

vibrating up through the floor, humming

in the walls, everywhere.

I will wear clothes that get me love…

I will scent myself

to find love…

I will paint my face

to attract love…

I will sculpt my body

to perfect love….

I will groom my hair

to waft love…

I will signal my hunger

without knowing my desperation…

I will scream my loneliness

in silent longing glances

across parties,

in stores,

twist my neck,

twist my soul

for its wanting……

want my soul

without knowing

that it is love

without a search

without a need

without a struggle.

It took me but half a life

to meet the person

in whom love made a home for me.

I twisted and howled so loud

I did not see her when she first knocked at my door.

Her face was not familiar

her smell was strange

her voice was odd

I kept looking

like so many fools before me

love did not make the noise

of the neighbor’s apartment

the thump of the passing car

love was unexpected

because I was drawing children’s pictures

in a book with a silly title:

True Love For Soul Mates in Eternity.

That was the wrong book.

My love gently took the book from my hand;

here, she whispered, look around you

this is what love really is:

only when you’ve exhausted your immaturity

are you ready

to care for someone

as deeply as I now care

for you.

Look around you

at the heartsick lonely ones

who sniff greedily but disdainfully

for a few moments

at the possibility of love

and then move on,

hoping somehow love will find them

when they have missed its delicate sign

a thousand times, so busy with the pursuit

that they have failed the simple lessons

of caring.

Now I have, at last, exhausted my immaturity:

now your voice is familiar,

your face is beautiful

your music is here,

in the room with me,

not some distant fateful sound,

here, with me,

I hear you, I see you,

I smell you,

I love you more
all the time.

Poem For My Wife's 60th Birthday

We met like survivors appearing out of the dust of a battle just ended.

I could barely see you, all scarred and wounded.

My hair had turned to mud.

We had fought for different kings

but we had survived the wars.  Now we serve the same king

and we are together.

Today you are sixty.  I know, that's a hard stone for a woman

to swallow.  You think you're done for.  It doesn't matter. 

In this kind of life, there is no beginning middle or end.

You are the same woman you've always been.

You think you don't work hard enough, but

you work way too hard.  Your bills are already paid, the important ones: mother, grandmother, partner.  You've given far beyond your heart's frontier.

Be sixty.  Be seventy.  If we get to eighty

we can walk together into the desert, beyond where the roads end.

Impressions

Impressions of you

are engraved upon me.

I don’t know when it happened:

that a certain way you laugh

became like oxygen when I was gasping

for breath.

Your laugh became my life.

When you cry and become small

and crawl into me for comfort;

I can no longer live without that.

Every day some other tiny part of you

takes residence in my soul;

little by little you have moved in.

I invited you to come here

but I did not know what I was doing.

The best parts of me, the parts

I seldom have the sense to visit,

met and agreed

you should be here.

“We’ll tell him later,”

they concurred,

pointing at the hapless man who slipped and stumbled

amid the twisted debris of his life.

“We’ll let him know when he most needs to know.

For now it’s enough that she’s there,

that she won’t go away no matter what a fool he is.”

Now I know.  They told me.  Or I heard them.

Or something changed and I knew.

There are things you do with your voice

that are like keys that unlock boxes

that contain gifts I have always wanted.

There are ways you smell

that remind me of the best days of my childhood.

There are things you make with your hands

that I watch like a happy captive.

There are ways you mispronounce words

that make little dances erupt in my stomach.

Oh, lovely one, how can you doubt yourself,

when it is the very things you doubt

that I most cherish?  It is your mistakes

that tickle me,

it is your funny odors that have seeped into me

until I can no longer tell

whose sweat I am smelling.

It is your hair that refuses to harm me,

though it could turn lethal at any moment.

Impressions of you are engraved upon me

so much, that when you are not here,

I must write a poem

to bring you home.

What Isn't Love?

No one has ever seen the next poem.  There was a period in which I was obsessed with a woman.  It was a terrible, destructive, painful experience. The woman enjoyed her power over me and used it to pull me in, push me out, toy with me.  She wasn't such a bad person.  She was simply in thrall to her own problems and the two of us constructed an awful parody of love.  During that period I wrote several poems exploring rage, obsession and the difference between healthy love and obsessive love.  I chose to include it in this collection because I think such experiences are not uncommon.  Many of us have been through the agony of obsessive, jealous, manipulative and enslaving attachment.

What Isn't Love?

Staring into space at work,

while over and over you rehearse

something you must say to wound your lover.

Or having to replay

again and again throughout the day

some way that your lover wounded you.

Listening to the sound

of cars homeward bound;

to extend the range of audibility

farther and farther down the street,

parsing motor noise as you wait:

car too big, car too small,

how long will he or she be gone?

Wincing when your lover smiles

through a party's unheard talk

with a too-attractive stranger;

it feels so much like danger.

To miss someone is sweet,

but helplessness is bitter,

and love does not taste bitter,

rejection is the acrid morsel on the tongue.

Trying too hard to be good;

trying too hard to be bad;

trying too hard not to feel;

feeling too hard to try,

and wanting to cry

when you beg for love

as if it were a drug,

then moan in shocked surprise

when you don't feel high.

And you grow more passionate

with each betrayal.

What isn't love?

Heat without light;

lust without compassion;

compassion without passion.

No word exists for what isn't love

but it's always been around

in promises that are broken

in the language being spoken

by those who cannot hear

its splintered sound.

Listen Carefully

Listen carefully.

If you have held a child in  your arms,

tenderly, warmly, feeling yourself flow

into your child, feeling yourself melt

into your child,

that is how you, too, are being held, always.

Your child also holds another child,

a future child who is eternally present,

in her arms.

And that child holds someone,

living, evolving, eternally present,

in his arms.

And what holds you in its arms

is being held by something greater,

warmly, tenderly, and that too

is being held by something greater still

in its arms, infinitely held, holding,

creating, soothing, caring.

Angels hold other angels

in their arms,

Buddhas care for their Bodhisattvas,

holding, tender,

nothing is alone,

no one is lost,

no death is unredeemed,

no tragedy is without triumph.

There is no suffering without a holding caring hand

of empathy and love.

Listen carefully.

The Self

Be a person

whenever you get the chance.

Be new.  Distinguish yourself

from primal ooze.

Form intelligence,

pursue it with outrageous diligence.

What an opportunity!

To exist

as a discreet form,

a single mind,

may be rare as a precious gem.

Some gurus teach

that there is no self.

I think there’s so much self

that it’s easy to suffer

mistaken identity.

There is a self to be.

There is a mind to think,

a body to feel

a soul that is real.

Wave flags of your own design

crazily, where no one can see them.

Wave yourself in all your colors,

dance until you are without breath.

Be a person,

don’t hesitate. 

Don’t be one of those pallid beings

who die without filling up

with madness, with tragedy and passion,

with glorious mistakes and profound learning.

This is it, your big chance.

Be a person.  Be afraid, be brave,

be wrong, be right, it doesn’t matter,

just be

what you are and invent everything else

as you go along. 

Three Poems

Three  Poems

Hummingbird

At the tip of my nose

there is something sweeter

than any earthly perfume,

yet I cannot smell it.

Every time my eyes blink

a vision appears

of splendor beyond imagining;

I see it not.

At the ends of my fingers

is a touch filled with love

deeper and truer than any devotion

I can conceive.

Yet my hands hang loose

connecting with nothing.

If I turn around,

it is behind me.

If I look over my right shoulder,

it hides at my left.

There is nothing for me to do.

You will show yourself

when you wish.

I know you are here,

hiding in music I can’t hear,

loving me

as the lover I have never found,

obscuring yourself

in the clarity I have sought

but not achieved.

Sometimes I am discouraged,

but not deterred.

You are here, you are here,

waiting for me to stop the drama.

I can’t find you by any effort,

though you embrace me like a coccoon.

I can’t smell you, see you, touch you,

catch you, hold you,

love you, discern you,

sense you in my breathing,

achieve you in my dying.

I can only exist as I find myself,

nothing more.

You would not have made me this way

unless it was your will to do so.

You would not hide yourself

so close to me,

unless you intended yourself to be found.

Hunted By The Hawk

Make joy from stones.

Make wit from mud,

make humor from blood.

The tiny finch flies crazily,

for the sheer fun of it,

though it knows, each morning,

that it’s hunted by the hawk.

We too, each morning,

are hunted by the hawk.

 No Title

I wish I was still young and beautiful.

I am glad, however, that I am not the person

I was, when I was young and beautiful.

For a while, I didn’t recognize myself

when I looked in the mirror.

Who is this man,

whose hair has fallen out,

who grunts when he gets out of bed,

who limps where he once danced?

Then, I began to

accommodate to what a life really is,

to what a person can become,

to what I have become.

I still look at the young and beautiful,

I still envy the wildness of their feelings,

but pity the wildness of their feelings.

I have been gored soundly and with

thudding impact by the untamed bull of life. 

When I was young and beautiful,

I was cruel. 

When I could dance,

I danced for attention,

not for love. 

Now, occasionally, some rhythm

takes me, and I still undulate,

a few steps, back and forth.

Those few steps are worth

more than every dance I danced

when I was young and beautiful. 

A Trailer Park Woos A Tornado

A Trailer Park Woos A Tornado

Art Rosch Oct 10, 2010

Do I see a swirling black cloud

off to the southeast, with big manly

thunderheads towering into the deep blue sky?

Oh yeah, it’s me baby, I’m comin’ to GIT you!

Please, o heart of hearts, sweep me off my cinderblocks,

tear off my tin roofs and toss them everywhere!

Just gimme some time, honey bun,

I haven’t got my wind yet.

You?  Short on wind?  Who else you been destroyin’?

I hear Dreamin’ Acres got a good tossin' just a little while ago.

Now, baby, don’t be that way.  A dinky lil’ F2 was showin’ off

near the county line.

Don’t you go using the “F” word on me, big boy.

For all I know, that F2 was YOU, befo' you got your growth.

Awwww, baby?  Can’t you see how I’m swellin’ for you?

Me and a hundred other trailer parks ‘tween here and Kansas City.

And what if it’s true?  I’m a tornado!  I just can’t help myself.

Look!  I’m goin’ F-5 to prove my love.

(Sighs).  Allright, sugar.  Just give these folks a chance to run to their cellars, a’fore you, uh huh (coughs coyly)  blow me apart!

What?  I CAN’T HEAR YOU!  I’m comin’.  I’m comin’ fast!

Just don’t be wearing no soybean skirts, mister!

WHAT?  RRRRrrrrrrrr!

Whoops!  There went my picnic tables.  You devil, you!

Prayer From The Heart

Show me the way, Lord.

I am always your student.

I am always in love with you.

I will change myself

to follow the deepest promptings

that you have planted in my heart.

Show me not the answer,

show me the right questions

to ask.  Show me what is right

and I will do it.

I will fail, often.

If I ask for something that does not help me,

show me the error, and lead me to that

which helps me.

Show me how to love, Lord.

Many things pose as love;

how do I sort my way through all the masks

that show themselves as love

that are not love.

Show me how to live my life.

I walk in a trance,

I move without being awake

I act without a plan.

My head is fuzzy; my limbs do not respond well.

My walk is tilted.

I don’t know when I’m hungry.

I eat whenever my stomach hurts.

I breathe air that I have spoiled.

My spirit seems clogged. Though I want to fly

I have no wings.

Help me to listen

to know your voice

when I hear it.

A thousand teachings flood my senses

until I am falling over the ropes of words

of those who claim to be wise.

Cloudy mysticism is everywhere:

“we are all one, god is in all of us,

listen to the silence within you,”

so many messages that do not bear

on my experience of reality.

I only know what my day presents,

nothing more.  I can feel my fellow humans,

their fears and their dreams.

I would serve and be served by them

if I had something real to give.

Show me what is real, Lord.

Show me a work that is generous and clean.

Show me how to use my gifts,

for you have given me so many,

yet I squander them

and am left with a greed

that controls me.

Show me what is possible, Lord.

I would love to believe that anything

is possible.

I need to have faith in Faith.

My senses tell me

that nothing is fixed, that the earthly world

swirls like a fluid dream. I want to know

what is true, Lord.

If nothing is fixed, then nothing is impossible.

Show me how to master it, Lord.

At the depths of my heart, I long to master life.

I long to master awareness itself.

Show me my own mind, Lord.

I don’t know who else to ask, but You.

Show me how to wear myself

in the best light.  Show me grace, Lord, show me

all the things I have forgotten, all the things I knew

when I was a child,

before I lost my courage,

before I cared whether I won or lost

or tied or died or lived well

or lost myself in dark valleys,

before I learned to walk,

before I learned to talk

before I learned to think.

Show me everything, Lord,

show me all that I need

and all that I can handle

to create me as your heart’s desire.

Show me how to make your heart’s desire

my heart’s desire,

that I may walk alongside you

secure in the knowing of you

as my friend and mentor.

Show me, Lord, show me.

I weep with desire, show me

reveal it to me though it be too bright

reveal it to me in the little bits that you deem right,

any way you want to bring me into your heart,

Lord, just show me.

I'm Giving Away Prints!

I believe in my writing. I think there's something special about it, but every writer must believe that, or it would be impossible to go on writing.  Writing is both a brutal and wonderful calling.  The main problem is to attract readers, to persuade people that something really beautiful is going on here.  My poems have popped out in minutes, while my books have taken years, sometimes decades to write.  I feel an equal passion for both the short easy ones and the long works that have been like wrestling alligators.  I love the challenge of writing novels.

I don't wear a religion or spirituality on my sleeve.  I like to be more devioius, I like to be both sacred and profane. I am in what is loosely called the Spirit-Mind-Body culture.  I've put in many years of practice and study. My innate modesty prevents me from boasting of my sublime spiritual achievements.  I am adored by my partner and several dogs and cats.  Now I need fans of my writing.  I am irreverent. I have opinions about gurus, life-coaches, the whole "make your dream come true" philosophy.
We should all go for our dreams, but sometimes one can dream the wrong dream, and achieving it can be a disaster.

Here's the deal.  Sign up as a follower of this blog.  Leave a few comments, or show me that
you're sincere.  I will send you an 8X11 print of your choice from the galleries here or my website
at www.artsdigitalphoto.com. Get really involved and I'll make it a 12X18.  That's some serious print.

 I write on photography for Shutterbug Magazine and have two covers to my credit.. I've won a United Nations award for environmental photography.  I'm especially fond of night shots, of the beautiful sky.  I've been selling my prints for ten years  Now my writing is gaining momentum.  A few years ago I sold a science fiction story to Playboy, and it won an award.  Now my book, AVOIDING THE POTHOLES: ROAD STORIES OF A CHANGING AMERICA is being requested by agents.

Contact me at artsdigiphoto@gmail.com or through the blog and we'll talk about what print you want.

Leave comments.  Enjoy.

Art

Everything Is In A Look

Everything ã1999
written 1972

Arthur Rosch



Everything is in a look.
Yet still, everything
is in looking away.
Unable to breathe suns from each other,
we turn to contemplate
lonely space,
and wash our hearts
with what warmth remains.
And again, that look,
rending the cosmos,
pours from the vat of creation
in our eyes.
The unspeakable love dashes its silences
to death,
against the perimeters of our exiles.
Yet, and there is always a yet,
to be born, to be resurrected
in a touch. The miracle is
that my skin was made to meet your skin,
that unknowable lightnings are our servants
to carry the burdens of love and loneliness.
Somehow my universe gathers energy
and spreads, with the vague arms of an amoeba
to some call on the horizon.
No matter that horizons always receed;
for if you too were to will your stars and dust
towards the furthest reach,
perhaps we would meet on some plain
lit by the ecstasy of celestial collision.
And perhaps we must die
to know each other.

Look! I would fling off my skin
like a cloak,
to show you the sun that burns within.
But as it is, only my face,
and what desperate radiations that can pass
through this terrible cloak
may reach you.
Know me! Know me!
Not by my escapes into smiles
but by my facelessness,
too full to shine,
too lonely to weep.
We are infinity
yet the mystery is always a deeper note
than we can hear.
Hearken to the remotest timbre,
it rises from our source
but hides its silence.
Listen to the mask of music,
behold the facade of suns,
yet be ready to fling them away
to peer into the depth beyond depth.
Love only wears faces to entice us
in our simplicity.
God dons the robe of the cosmos
that we may not plunge into her nakedness
before we ourselves are naked love.

A Worthy Destination

A Worthy Destination
Jan 28, 2003
revised Feb 15, 2010




I haven’t found peace.
I don’t own peace,
rent peace,
buy or sell peace,
though I do encounter peace
from time to time.
Peace is like a friend
who comes for a surprise visit.
As my life takes on a shape
in which peace feels comfortable
I see peace more often.
Peace is not easily found in this world.
Peace comes like an accident,
a good mishap.
Peace lands in my heart like
a bird that’s raised its young
and is looking for a new place to nest.
I thought I would know peace by now,
but it’s taking longer than I expected.
The biggest problem is my mind.
It’s like a bag turned inside out, its contents
are the world, spilled and crazy.
Peace is not comfortable
in the world. When I’m with peace, I feel as though I’ve brought a guest
to the kind of party
that’s broken up by the cops after midnight.
I need to make peace more welcome here.
I should send peace an invitation, find a good solid tree
where peace can perch and sing
before taking flight
to a more worthy destination.

Breath

Your breath has a shape
unique
like a fingerprint
no two alike
in all the world.
Everything about you
is found in your breath
all your lives
and deaths,
all your thoughts.
Think of your body
as gone,
only breath remains
it has an in stop
and an out stop
and contains so much more
than air.
If we could know one another
by our breaths
if we could see the human crowd
as a throng of breaths,
nothing else,
hello jagged anxious breath
how are you
hello smooth relaxed breath
nice to see you
the human race is
a breath collective
today some will arrive
today some will depart
lungs are merely homes
like hands fill gloves
everything sacred, every dark secret
lives in the breath
and when it leaves your body
it is a system of information
like a letter full of you,
air mail, breath mail.
I would tell you more of this
if I knew any more
but this is as far as I’ve got
in learning the nature of breath.

A Conversation With God

Lord, my whole life has been a conversation with you. It has been a pleading, praying, thanking, questioning, frustrating conversation. Though I am not answered in words, you answer me in every experience that occurs. There is no issue about my faith, about whether or not I accept your existence. It is not conditioned by what happens to me in my life. I don’t need good things and miracles to have faith. All I need do is look around at the world and I see an abundance of evidence. Without you and the great wind of your love, there would be, simply, Nothing. Instead, we have a great passionate world, a universe full of drama and strife, of burning stars, of miracles and mysteries. One thing I can see, Lord, is that you have made a universe that is not boring.
I thirst for truth, but truth is not an easy thing to grasp. I don’t want to be this way, the way I am: addicted, afflicted, incomplete, emptied out, wounded and afraid. I don’t want to be this way. But I am. These conditions go along with being human. Being alive and made of this material stuff is to be lost in a jungle, where spirit hides behind things and yet is out in the open for those with clear sight. My sight is not clear. It is obscured by my needs for so many things. I need comfort and enjoyment and every desire leads to a battleground, a wrestling with a thousand demons. I need truth, but I fear truth. I hold it at arm’s length lest it turn out to be monster with sharp teeth, about to rip my personality to shreds and throw me down into madness. I am afraid that I can’t handle things the way they are.

I am like a fairy tale creature following a trail of crumbs through the forest. Somewhere in this darkness there is a home in a clearing, a warm place to feed and rest and abide. I wait for the appearance of that abiding place, though it may not appear until after I die. If that is what is decreed, that I wander through the years of my life in a constant search for truth that is never satisfied, so be it.
My faith does not diminish. Nor does my fear. Faith and fear seem strange bedfellows. Both seem constant to my condition. Both conceal the same transcendant animal, hidden amid the trees and vines. Both counsel me to leave hope at the entrance to the forest, and proceed in spite of the hopelessness of the cause.

Such is a true conversation with you, God.

Ordinary Consciousness

There is no ordinary consciousness.
There is something we do every day,
get in our cars, go to work,
get food, pay the credit cards,
raise our families.
Billions of people
do it, thinking it is ordinary.
That is consciousness,
and nothing about consciousness
is ever ordinary.
Sometimes I long for visions
of sudden grace,
in the middle of the ordinary day,
oh how I wish I could be taken
to a visionary understanding, right now,
and know what is real, what it’s all about.
I should be careful what I wish for.
If I were to be taken to that magic land
I would also be held accountable
for my mistakes. Paradise
has a price for admission.
Paradise is Truth; in Paradise
there is no lingering trail of lies and crimes.
In Paradise, all bills have been paid.
I am grateful for ordinary consciousness;
I'm still behind on some of my accounts,
and consciousness knows exactly what I owe,
and to whom.
That is not so ordinary after all.

The Kingdom

I wrote this poem ten years ago.  Its tone reminds me of the Song of Songs, from the Old Testament,

King Solomon's ode to erotic love.  I put it into my novel, "The Gods of The Gift" as part of an exchange of

poems that occurs among my characters as they cross a vast desert

Am I ready to love?

How much more of the perfume of my soul

must I exude, before she tastes its waft upon the air

and is drawn to me?

 How can I be patient,

when to feel the heat of her body

close to mine

 is as miraculous as the sunrise?

When will I feel her hair in my hand?

 When will I touch her cheek with my lips?

 It is not the great rush of consummation

 that calls me, but the simplest gestures.

 I will smell her breath, and my blood will triumph.

 I will brush her hair, and feel the softness of her life

 in my hands.

 I will know the curve of her throat,

the music of her voice.

Her hand will be a warm spring

always rising from the depths

heated by love.                      

Her touch will put me on a silken throne.

 I will awake each morning eagerly

with the salt of her in my mouth.

My days will be a song of gratitude

that she has come,

my nights a roving through untold treasures.

Her love will restore to my lover's heart

the magic kingdom of childhood.

A Very Short Poem

Dewdrops on spiderwebs.

Sit lightly with life.

Prophet

Oh lord, oh lord,

what has befallen me?

That which I hoped to make straight

only becomes more twisted.

That which should be understood

only becomes more strange.

How did I come to this unexpected shore?

And what am I to make of the walking wreck of myself?

It is a mixed gift, this life, it is hard

to feel so completely lost

in complexity not of my making.

I wanted to be a radiance

but I am more like a garbage can

tipped by a racoon in predawn hours.

I pick myself up,

I sweep my contents

into a tidy pile,

but each time I think to rest,

I am again overturned.

I speak to you, o lord,

like the wounded Jew,

like the baffled bloodied prophet,

like the broken fated sage.

I take help from any quarter,

even those with dangerous denizens.

I take comfort with the scorpion,

I sleep with diseases,

I mark my worth with the vague knowledge

that I am somehow loved.

Still I marvel and lament

at my scattered state,

at my continued surprise that I am alive,

that I move my limbs with some dim purpose,

that I have any faculty left to cry out to you.

Oh lord, what has befallen me?

You see, I have nothing but questions.

It could be much worse, I freely admit.

It could be much better,

I ruefully entreat.

Pieces of me have gone numb.

Whole continents of my psyche have been submerged,

drowned, forgotten.

I am the world I have made.

I am a man, dreadfully incomplete,

unwilling to meet the terror,

reluctant to behold the fire,

shrinking always from the worst case,

taking the hand of any wiser being,

like a lost child who needs to be led,

anywhere, as long as it seems to be

a worthy destination.

I shall try now, lord, to snatch a bit of sleep

from the bottom of the night’s cup.

I’m glad we had this little talk.

I thank you, uncomfortably,

like one who has opened the wrong gift

at the wrong party.

Oh, is this for ME?

I’m not quite sure it fits,

I’m not sure how to use it.

I’ve broken it a little

but it still works.  See?

I’ve tried, I’ve hopped on one foot,

I’ve danced insanely.

I’m still here,

waiting for your soft voice

to bring me peace.

My Girl Suffers

My girl suffers, and sometimes goes far away

where I can’t see her pain.

I can only see the sign of her pain

like the tracks of a large animal that has passed by.

I am not a great tracker, but she is my girl.

I do everything to relieve her suffering

but it isn’t enough.  It’s my best.

She always gives her best when I suffer,

and I never know when my pain will leave signs

like a large animal that has passed by.

She is the better tracker, her senses are finer.

That’s what we do for each other,

because we love one another,

even when the love hurts, because the loved one hurts.

My girl suffers too much, but she is so strong;

she bears her pain with dignity and sorrow.

The world suffers and the world’s suffering

makes more pain for my girl to bear,

because that’s who she is: every animal, every tiny bird or mouse,

all the life and death that comes and goes,

my girl knows, feels, deals, for her it is all real.

The world’s suffering is folded into her suffering,

her suffering is  folded into the world’s suffering,

they have ways of being the same pain.

Some people are more expert at pain than others.

My girl is an expert.  She is much stronger than I am.

When I was young I learned to duck, to watch out.

My girl trusts too much, and she doesn’t duck.

I help because I can, because I  duck so fast.

My girl suffers, and sometimes goes far away, far away,

because she must.  I leave the gates, the doors, the bridges open,

so she can find her way back.

I am not strong enough to go where she goes,

but I keep the lights on and the fire burning,

for when she returns, smiling,

playful and childlike, once again.