Aach...ye speak like a poet, but ye punch like one too...

PUNCH LIKE A POET

Thursday, April 22, 2004
  
A poem before bed

A CURE FOR HICCUPS

Drink a glass of water upside down
and backward is what I heard growing up,
though I could never figure
what it looked like or how
to keep the water off the kitchen floor,
like I could never understand
how to startle them away
by asking my brother to frighten them
back into my stomach, or wherever.
You have to wait them out,
like most things, these strange, slow elves
trampolining on your diaphragm.
If you want to drink you do it
in quick, metered sips. You walk
like a drunk. You read a book
like a man on a ship.
The only cure I've found
is to hold your breath hard, like
you used to hold your father's hand,
like you used to clutch your breath
after coming off the high board
at the swimming pool and clawing
up from water so deep
you swore you'd never dive again,
ears buzzing with the voices in the water,
lungs sobbing,
your straining eyes like softballs.

(4/21/04)

# posted by Daniel at 12:30 AM.

Observation

Poets and physicists are, if not actual siblings, at least close cousins. The latter looks at the world and asks "How?"; the former wonders "Why?" They're both dealing in reasons, though, if reasons of different sorts.

Or, if you prefer:

Poets are physicists who can't do math.

# posted by Daniel at 12:12 AM.

Saturday, April 17, 2004
  
Poem

PASCHAL SONG

Easter morning I slipped out when the singing ended
and the preaching began to echo like a lost voice in a box.
Shouldered open the heavy door and stepped
into a cold spring wind under stirring clouds,
then drove home with the intermittent rain crying
against the windshield, the wipers' hands
slapping it away--don't you know? Don't you know?
Don't you know?

I don't know if you came awake with a gasp,
every cord of your body flexed like sails
stretched by a hard wind, or with a shout, startling
off the floor so the astonished stone fainted from the door,
or if you washed back into your flesh
like tide returning, if you breathed slowly in the grave,
half-awake darkness,
puzzled at the riddle of your name.

And when light fractured through
maybe it was lit dynamite in a grocery bag, or water
pushing apart a dam; maybe it fingered through the cracks
for a long instant, the way water pries open the dam before it fails.
Or maybe it seeps in a drop at a time, filling up the world
like a slow night rain falls through streetlights
and fills up the garbage cans I pulled down the driveway.
They loiter at the curb, restless, their lids hanging open, like mouths
waiting to be emptied, to be filled.

(4/04)

# posted by Daniel at 12:07 AM.

Saturday, April 03, 2004
  
Some thoughts after reading Thomas Merton on the Daodejing

Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk who lived in Kentucky during the middle part of the last century. On Sean's advice I picked up The Thomas Merton Reader today at Half Priced Books. I journaled the following thoughts after reading some of his observations on the Tao and Eastern mysticism. Also at work here is a wonderful conversation, sans bullshit, that I shared with Jonothan while traversing here and there around Austin.

Tradition tells us that pride is the chief of sins. I would say pride is, more specifically, the root of all sin. In the Beatitudes (fifth chapter of Matthew's Gospel) Jesus sets forth the conditions and circumstances of blessedness ("happiness" might be another appropriate word, though happiness of a specific, transcendent sort). Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven he tells us. This is poverty, and the condition of poverty, if acknowledged, drives us to a posture of humility, the opposite of pride. But what is pride? In the context I'm addressing, pride is the belief-therefore-behavior that I have spiritual merit, possibility, standing of my own. Pride is above all the will to make myself, rather than the humility to submit to the making of God. If this is true, then true virtue begins in, and only in, my act of surrender, giving up on the pursuit of virtue. This is not the same thing as rejecting virtue. Turning my back on goodness and walking back down the road I came is as much an act of self-willing as any demonstration of Pharisaical self-righteousness, and is not surrender but rather going over to fight for the enemy.

So Lord, teach me neither to strive nor despair. Teach me to kneel in the dust of the narrow road with open arms, waiting on Thee.

# posted by Daniel at 10:29 PM.