acceptance

five poems

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

Thunder and Wine
“I answered you in the secret place of thunder.”
Psalm 81:7

thick fog clearing
as thunder echoes
across Casco Bay

on Cushing Island
lights go dark
then Cliff and here

in this dim sanctuary
the cathedral bells
won’t stop ringing

no one sees
the stained-glass smeared
by the blood moon light

once again wine
turns to water bread
back to grain

 

Of God
Can you lift up your voice to the clouds,
so that a flood of waters may cover you?
– Job 38:34

what are my chances
when your words
linger and scratch

like wool uniforms
quietly removed
when the orphan

and widow flinch
at your whispered
good night

I’ll promise to lie still
if your light but touches
the water’s edge

there an egret
white as the moon
hunts in the reeds

 

Creating Myth
Notes on Jack Spicer – 1978
A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.
– Jack Spicer

make myth by
destroying myth

then explain
what came before

one final embrace
before departing

into meaning
or a hell of meanings

everything slipping
or sliding

haunted by the poetic
and the laughter

the duplicity
of words

and how they replace
the historical

with an empty
vessel

and though we struggle
to pull them back

our hushed shadows
will not be closed

simply by stating
their closure

 

My Final Thought of You

It happens often now, forgetting
the words but not the thing
itself.

This week alone the words cilantro,
Curtis Mayfield, actuary seemed
lost, erased.

 You, too, are there in a slight daydream,
a glimpse of a waning moon
on a sunny day.

A thunderstorm rises from Mount Blue
not 20 miles away. The birds and I
find shelter.

The stream is silent, hopeful. My breathing
slows as I count to measure the first
strike of lightning.

 

Three Halves
(in which the seeker discovers
he is that which is sought)

I am on a motorcycle
say a Triumph yes
a Triumph tearing

out of town on a moonlit
night Friday or early
Saturday morning and say

I am passed by a truck
an electrician’s truck
that has no business

passing a man like me
all in black leather
you’d understand

when I pass again
looking back to threaten
the driver flipping

the bird say or sneer
my surprise
that the driver is me

and all those cables
spooled on poles
by the breakdown lane

are mine to connect
or repair or destroy in this
the third half of my life

 

Flame

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background blaze blazing bonfire

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“Abbot Lot went to see Abbot Joseph and said: `Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and according as I am able I strive to cleanse my heart of bad thoughts: now what more should I do?’ The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like lamps of fire. He said: `Why not become all flame?’”

now I understand – the path to healing

/ Bill Schulz / 1 Comment

Ronald Rolheiser – In his last book, The Living Flame of Love, John (St. John of the Cross) proposes a theory of, and a process for, healing. In essence, it runs this way: For John, we heal of our wounds, moral flaws, addictions, and bad habits by growing our virtues to the point where we become mature enough in our humanity so that there’s no more room left in our lives for the old behaviors that used to drag us down. In short, we get rid of the coldness, bitterness, and pettiness in our hearts by lighting inside our hearts enough warm fires to burn out the coldness and bitterness.

The algebra works this way: The more we grow in maturity, generativity, and generosity, the more our old wounds, bad habits, temperamental flaws, and addictions will disappear because our deeper maturity will no longer leave room for them in our lives. Positive growth of our hearts, like a vigorous plant, eventually chokes-out the weeds. If you went to John of the Cross and asked him to help you deal with a certain bad habit in your life, his focus wouldn’t be on how to weed-out that habit. Instead the focus would be on growing your virtues: What are you doing well? What are your best qualities? What goodness in you needs to be fanned fan into fuller flame?

By growing what’s positive in us, we eventually become big-hearted enough so that there’s no room left for our former bad habits. The path to healing is to water our virtues so that these virtues themselves will be the fire that burns out the festering wounds, addictions, bad habits, and temperamental flaws that have, for far too long, plagued our lives and kept us wallowing in weakness and pettiness rather than walking in maturity, generosity, and generativity.

beyond words…beyond names

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DSC_6975Prayer is what you bring – for prayer is your gift to us rather than what you ask of us. If only I could pray – and yet I can and do pray. Teach me to go to the country beyond words and beyond names. Teach me to pray on this side of the frontier, here where the woods are.   – Thomas Merton, Journal July 17, 1956

Driving All Night – William Matthews

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My complicated past is an anthology,
a long line painted on the plains.
I feel like literary history
about to startle the professors.

But it’s not true.

Days ahead, snow heaps up
in the mountains
like undelivered mail.
After driving all night
I guess what it’s like
to fly over them.
For the first time you see
how close things are together,
how the foothills push up
just past where you quit
driving. Urgencies
sputter in the exaltation
of chill air.

Your heart
begins to fall like snow
inside a paperweight.
Oh when in your long damn life,
I ask myself, when will
you seek not a truce,
but peace?

Prayer at Sunrise – James Weldon

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Now thou art risen, and thy day begun.
How shrink the shrouding mists before thy face,
As up thou spring’st to thy diurnal race!
How darkness chases darkness to the west,
As shades of light on light rise radiant from thy crest!
For thee, great source of strength, emblem of might,
In hours of darkest gloom there is no night.
Thou shinest on though clouds hide thee from sight,
And through each break thou sendest down thy light.

O greater Maker of this Thy great sun,
Give me the strength this one day’s race to run,
Fill me with light, fill me with sun-like strength,
Fill me with joy to rob the day its length.
Light from within, light that will outward shine,
Strength to make strong some weaker heart than mine,
Joy to make glad each soul that feels its touch;
Great Father of the sun, I ask this much.

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