Barefoot

Like stepping out of bed

at the height of the night

with the cold floor on my feet

sweeping away overheated dreams,

like Moses exposing his toes

so that sand could scrape away

their caked murder-blood

before the burning bush,

I sacrifice the status shown

by shoes shined or scuffed

or sneakers bright or beaten-up

before the seen but unperceived Presence,

who cleaned and healed his friends’ feet

with cool water and his own clothes,

not sickened by the stink and stickiness

of thick toenails, opaque and yellow,

who let his feet be pierced

and his toes cramp and curl,

the nail tightening the nerves

until they twisted and tore,

who casts off sandals and feet

and the trappings of human dignity

and dons the appearance of vine and wheat

now lifted high before me.

After the Wine

When the festivities are over,

the upper room empty,

the singing stopped,

the table cleared,

will you leave me alone in the garden?

When the procession is gone,

the tabernacle vacant,

the organ silenced,

the altar stripped,

will you leave me alone in the garden?

When the stars are falling,

the houses abandoned,

the radios broken,

the sky scoured,

will you leave me alone in the garden?

Will your eyes close

and your breathing slow

on the night I need you the most?

Guests

Of the mysteries of sense and grace,

the greatest is that of home,

how place and person brush hands

and haunt each other with scent and taste,

bonding walls with blood and bone.

Some guests come and build such bonds;

they bless our things with newborn sight

and let us breathe our objects’ essence:

the spice of wood stoves, the tang of cut lawns,

the mustiness of a stuffed-away kite.

Our guests instill these with their presence

and kindle the warmth each object houses.

But some guests become our home.

When they leave, the warmth follows.

We seek them in the mirror-frames

lined with cards, in the scent of a comb,

in all our things they left half hollow.

We eventually empty out their names

with each repetition, and the words grow foreign.

So we become the ever-guests

searching for a host, for one to reconcile

our noses to the earth,

searching for scents in which to rest

after houses tinged with exile.

Maundy Thursday

Instead of bell echoing,

stick hit stick like breaking bones

as Host’s bread became mere cloak.

Now He with hidden limbs leaves

in Father’s arms like newborn,

but suddenly silenced, mourned,

and gently, oh so gently

stripped from sight, in cloth cocooned,

in home gone quiet too soon.

Western

In the Western flatlands, a man is a mountain,

a magnet for lightning and spotlight.

The camera hugs close to my head to make me

the center of the empty street awaiting my enemy,

while mustachioed barkeeps and whisky-worn grannies

slam their shutters to the coming bullet bursts.

But what if before he arrives,

the continental plates collide

to dwarf our duel with rising ridges,

to drown out our sneers and ricochets

with the roar of rock on rock?

Will the camera then abandon me,

leaving me just a man against a man

in a land of men against men

overshadowed by countless mountains,

a country so overflowing with heroes

that it bleeds, that it hemorrhages heroes

who gush from the ground

without history or family,

a succession based on oil for blood

and the laying of whores for the laying-on of hands?

Luke Looks at the Setting Suns of Tatooine

As a child mowing the lawn in the summer,

I saw sunsets through the trees of my backyard,

orange light winking through the leaves like stars.

And when the mower’s roar sputtered and died,

the crickets’ creaking song seeped into the breeze

like music crossing centuries and galaxies,

swept away on a wind that swirled from the spin

of binary stars dancing in the dark,

the distant strain of an alien harp.

From across the cosmos, I caught the echoes

of twilight jungles a-chatter with tongues

from canopy cities on a cooled-off sun.

Swooning from these sci-fi symphonies,

my mind reached through the trees and beyond,

across seas separating dusk from dawn

and nebulae consecrating dust into light,

through the music of the spheres

and the liturgy of the light-years,

to the ever-distant and ever-near

voice of the one both fantastic and real,

who is past the stars but present here.

To the Blessed Mother

I. To the Mother in the Manger

Did the very air vibrate,

humming in the humid space

soaked in the Holy Ghost?

Did the sky push down on

you, heavy with the host

of heaven’s angels?

And did you feel the heat

as you were caught in the cross-

fire of God’s gaze on God?

II. To the Mother at the Cross

When the cross’s splinters stabbed your heart,

did you feel space unravel and rip

like the temple veil tearing apart?

When you knelt at the event horizon,

did the hole in heaven suck out the light

as the piercing wind was rising?

And when you saw the wound in space-time weep,

did time rewind, the cross now a cradle

where your baby cries himself to sleep?

III. To the Mother at Pentecost (Pentecost by Jean II Restout)

As the men cower beneath the burning shower,

you appear at peace; your smile seems to greet the fire

not as pain and napalm, but as a dear old friend,

as the heated spirit who came so long ago

and softly kissed you on that cool Nazarene night,

letting you wear his shadow like the warmest shawl.

Yet he knew you even within the silent womb

that swaddled you, when he suffused you cell by cell

and whispered purity into your brand-new blood.