Healing is always a miracle, a weaving back to life, the new bloom of work that can be done. Of days that can be sung.
FIVE MEDITATIONS FOR ONE DAY I Three sturdy robins, a puddle shining clean from the night’s rash storm and I had just prayed for the gray to rise: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, I thought, on a dare, and they lifted off, bathed and silver-winged in new light, sustained. II Clean morning rising over the hard sparkle of snow, the lab dog is drunk with scent, I, giddy with a fresh start. The sky dimpled and shy can’t help letting in yellow light, gold notions, true speaking in the brisk. III I practice cryogenics in my kitchen, the yeast in its cold package from the freezer resurrecting in the pocked mud colonies and miraculous loaves to cradle the thawing fishes.
God I have loved in the gold morning raising, across the bends of earth, her roots, her autumn trees, the deep-gold affirm of life-at-resistance, and, at last, in the soft still of late afternoon, at-rest. In the purple sky, stars straining through the cold reveal the shapes of human story. God I have loved autumn evenings in earth’s gold passionate mind and in the human intimacies-- crumbs on a table, the orchid’s curl, a feeder readied for finches, shoes in a communal line, an iron set to steam a shirt-- the dear taking care, the order-making, light against dark and rubble and deep space.
Winter Window (The small world becomes the expanded world, confinement an opening to vast space and time and all the weight and all the flights it allows and to which it bears witness.)
Small Prayer in February, Morning The day straight as a stick bent itself, toward evening, to listen to the twist of human words lamplit, then tumbled through the night.