1.
St. John of the Cross throws
twenty spiritual poems into
the Living Flame of Love,
watching them burn into
black, shredded shards
of nada and todo. Nothing
for the finite, human spirit,
everything for the divine-
driven soul, longing for
sweet, eternal union with
The Source of All That Is.
How John can savor
the delicate aroma of
the incense of praise
that emanates from the fire,
love translated as living
grace infused into the soul,
dead to itself, but alive
in the grasp of God. How does
the poet usurp the saint?
How does the penitent
claim his forgiveness,
his peace, his inward
teachings of the labyrinthine
love in which his soul
wanders, waiting on a sacred guide
to lead him into the arbor
of righteousness, of purity,
of ecstatic communion
with the Living Flame,
which sears away all
traces of the arrogant,
self-driven soul, the ratio-
empirical self that lusts
for certainty from finite
possibilities, that sees no God
in the niches of nature?
How the wretched ones retreat
from glory, how the minions
of myopic seekers miss the mark:
hamartia of the heart.

2.
John bears the cross as his
reward and burden, as the perfect
ending to his story of yearning
for union, of longing for love that
diminishes nada, that teases out
todo: The totality of Being that
succors the senses, mends the mind,
washes clean every obstacle
that stands in its way, elevates
every submission of will
above the calamity and
cacophony of the polluted world,
of tireless treks into temples
of doom to assert the supremacy
of the making mind, the force
of ratiocination that reigns over
every investigation and claim
into the nature of the self,
over every hypothesis,
experiment, spread sheet of data
and library of laws. Whose law
does the thirsting soul obey?
Is it not its own until the soul
is purified in the Living Flame
of Love, the eternal fire
that lights up the world in its
hubris and high comedy,
in its tragic truculence,
resisting grace that beckons
like shimmering sheets
of waterfalls as they splash
into deep, green pools, as they
plummet into like becomes
like, into the dancing dawn
of union, of embrace,
of the self singed of all sin,
raised up into the boundless
beauty of beatific visions,
of the wholeness of the will
and mind and soul and spirit,
of the renewed mortal body and
the traces of creation that cling
still to their impermanent places,
yearning also for perfect union,
for an end to their nothingness,
to their persistent contingency,
crying out for the beginning of
everlasting love, for the denouement
of existence's tragedy of errors:
the anti-Shakespearean play
of opposites, of ghosts and
beings of doubt, death and
decline trapped in the infinite
depths of self-obsession,
gazing into Narcissus’ mirror,
the focus receding to the blurred
horizon of perception,
to the inscrutable, shattered
realm of Imago Dei.

John invokes the power for
his soul to rise above every
mountain, to mount every
cairn that points forward
toward divinity, eternity,
ecstasy, authenticity
of the self made todo out of nada,
made to rest in the green
pools of destiny, droplets
splashing his face, falls
slaking his thirst, as he no longer
swims against the tides
that roil in his spirit like
pieces of a poem engulfed
in The Living Flame of Love,
scorched clean of error,
turned toward the wind
that scatters ashes abroad,
that blows where it will,
toward the telos that never
disappoints, that never dies:
Where every metaphor turns into
an axiom of beauty: the endless
struggle of like becomes like.

-- For the Rev. Tom Schaefer

Giant cottonwoods rake
the sky, slake their thirst
below dried-out creek beds.
The sunbaked soil fractures
into pieces of a shattered ***.

Octopus roots root out secret
channels underground, unclogged
by fish, debris or mythological
creatures rising from the rocks.
Trunks molt flattened flagstones

of bark, ragged chunks more gray
than brown, more a coat of armor
for battered torsos, more a pillar of steel
for massive, chipped legs. O Time! Age too
long, and bushy tops topple into the creek.

Leaves rustle like muted cymbals.
Still, there is much to celebrate in such
fearless longevity: Do not Heracles-sized
branches veer off in heroic Y’s that
claw their way higher and higher until

they burst through the clouds, free from
the world, frowning down upon it in
verdant condescension? I cannot answer.
Trees soar in silence. I scoot along the creek
bed, scrambling for arrowheads, for some sign

of human presence that shows I, too, belong among
the giants, shooting my roots underground,
rising up as an arbor above the dried-out
shadows, grasping for the sweet sap of longevity.
I shall bite off a bit of bark and bid the world adieu.

Apples fall from the tree
behind the Swiss chalet.
They fall through me as
shadows climb and crest
Wetterhorn Mountain,
crowned by rocky horns
borne from Michelangelo's
"Moses." Horns of brilliance
and power, horns of shining
light that passes through me
into the shadows of the sun-stained
mountain, whose horns turn,
twist and fall through me
into the scattered piles
of apples plopping
onto the neon green grass.
Apples tumble through me
as I pass into the silence
within the silence that beckons
from the mountaintops. I am
the fruit of darkness and light,
fruit of the horn of the divine,
a son of Moses seeking exodus
beneath this rocky band of ragged peaks.

He came dancing across the waters
with his galleons and guns.
Cortez, Cortez. What a killer....

Neil Young's high-register symphony
of electric guitars carries
over the sound waves, the lonely,
mournful, ever-mutating melodic
line a message of death and waste
and loss. In it I hear an elegiac call
to the coyotes in the fields,
howling for companionship
and comfort from their
missing, flea-bitten pack.

A shaky, high-pitched, grief-laden
voice tells of Montezuma and his
Aztec nation, alive in an idyll of many
colors and nature's pristine harmony --
a utopia only the modern, romantic
mind could conjure out of the ruins
of its own civilization.

Rubble rots, strewn through
the ages. The Aztecs die,
victims of viruses and steel,
while we, too, gasp for air
on makeshift ventilators,
going under the charged,
electric waves of consciousness,
dancing breathlessly to
the beepless grave. What a killer....

History breeds only conquest,
only the tragic conflict of cultures,
equally innocent of the unknown,
equally guilty of lusting for the blood
of the Other -- whether gold-drunken
Spain or a mutant cell slipped
beyond the bounds of some
fly-infested Chinese wet market.
Progress ends only in destruction,
while we dream of utopia and idylls
and call it good. Cortez, Cortez....

The coyotes howl for comfort
and the lasting scent of prey.
In the morning, they will hunt,
rustling through high grasses,
while we will rise to Neil Young's
symphonic, electric refrain:
What a killer....

Twin stallions gallop beside the sea,
their flanks sweating, curved backs
foaming, long, dark manes flying
through the brine, braided into whips.

Riderless, they splay the sand beneath
the tide, charge ahead as if in battle, flash
large white eyes of fiery purpose. Or is it
merely pleasure in taking stock of the sea?

I could sing of Pegasus, the perfect portrait
of their power, perfect myth of their reality,
perfect essence of their being, perfect eternal
Idea, as the hallowed Plato would have put it.

But I know only the Pegasus of my childhood
imagination, channeled through the huge, spotted
horses on my grandfather's ranch, larger than my
little life, all muscle and nerves and jittery to bolt.

I know only the lush leather saddles, hand-tooled,
badged with Baroque designs, smooth to the touch,
gear of Olympians, smelling of alfalfa, the hay stacked
high in barns for the uncertain days of winter.

I have sung the secrets of the sea, like Homer,
with his wine-dark waters that carried the long,
black Greek ships toward Troy. My twin stallions
surge to trample the ancient city's ruins. Ilium no more.

How I yearn to run with them, to speed over
the sands as if they were nothing but solid air,
as if they raised no resistance to racing, as if my
hooves could heave into them like a golden paddock.

O the line between dreaming and waking
is so fluid and frail. I breathe deeply and feel
the stallions fly over the ranch, up the canyon,
climbing, ever climbing into the atmosphere,

which constrains no thought, no memory,
no deep feeling for flight itself, for rising
over the ocean and its endless tracts of water,
its boundless kingdom of life and death.

How do I go on, here in my loneliness, ornate
saddle at my side, a shoot of hay between
my teeth, champing at the bit to tie myself
to the stallions' tails, to quiver my way

into the shadowed arroyos of dreams, where I
could walk without limping, where I could fly
without falling, where I could shake the brine
from my hair and laugh in the face of Zeus?

The stallions perform pristine pirations,
stealing time from the future, soaring past
days of ice and shivering woes, hay carrying
the bitter taste of sand and seaweed and brine.

I place my saddle on the ground, sit beside it,
and trace the swirls of its swift designs, spinning
me into dreams, into the weak waves that creep
upon the beach, that breach the line of death, only

to return again. Is time a straight arrow fast in flight
or an ever-spiraling circle like the Earth? How can we run
so far only to reach nowhere, only to teach ourselves
to heartlessly crack the whip, as cold as winter’s grip?

Diffused rays of lengthening light
scoot across the hardwood floor
and pool on the space where we last lay together.

A long yellow-pine slat of wood
gleams in the afternoon sun.
A bump of lacquer breaks the surface.

For eons, we have coaxed each other
into the light, bearing down upon us
in ever-whitening stripes of purification.

Our love is the light, seeping through
the dark crevices of our hearts,
scouring the deep recesses of shadow and doubt.

The floor creaks as we glide across it,
hardy survivor of this hundred-year-old house.
Our love creaks as the past thrusts itself into the present.

We cannot grasp it, but we feel its warmth
wash over us again and again. We know
the radiance of love overcomes all oblivion.

1.
We all die daily,
our breath shuddering
from the body,
the body shriveling
into matter, which
languishes, empty
and inert,
envying the
labyrinth of the soul.

What bright spirit
lures us back
into the light, stirs
us to awaken out
of our dark night?
What burden can
we still bear as
ghosts of ourselves,
erstwhile egos
chanting nada,
nada, nada as we
furtively avoid
the mirror of
Narcissus?

2.
We all die open-
eyed, gaping
at the void,
or a vast
field of stars
swirling and
sparkling above
the blackened
upper
atmosphere,
illuminating
the full breadth
of Being:
The Great
I Am of
everything that is.

Beside us, the cosmic
jester and curator
of the world
adds another
plastic frame to
a crudely rendered
self-portrait. Which
self paints the self?
Which self becomes
object and subject
simultaneously,
having its cake
and eating it, too,
but failing to notice
the crumbs
on the floor
and the icing
on its lips?

3.
So many questions
that challenge
the mastery of our
language, that
stretch the boundaries
of our mind like
an inky rubber band
dangerously
near to breaking
from overuse.
No answers
can verify
themselves
to us.
They demand
judgment, an
accounting that
only the dead
can deliver from
the far side of
the grave, beyond
the end of history,
beyond the erasure
of time.

4.
Daily we all die
only to rise again,
our lumpish
flesh electroshocked
into animation,
our soul newly
dependent on poetry
to dial in its
upper frequencies
before they
fade away
into static.
The tuner picks up
an AM station
out of Juarez.
The Mariachi
music reminds
us that this
energy may sputter
and flag like
a somnambulist,
but it never dies.