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      to the millions of surfaces that present themselves

      to a visitor’s eye at each turn along

      the arcing, neatly bordered pathways. All this

      beneath broad, heavy-leafed trees not native

      to this corner of the state: copper beech,

      ginkgo, weeping red maple. We are a world apart,

      not entirely to ourselves, just safely to one side.

      But it was not the brick dorms or landscaping,

      the dress code or college list that drew me

      twenty years ago to these lawns, this life decked

      with adolescents. It was the canvas hammock

      you said most visitors never see slung across

      the stream—between two birches—behind the rink.

      Fall and spring, you and your friends would go there

      and one at a time climb into the heavy cotton, pull

      the frayed sides up across your chests and swing,

      companions pumping the ropes for you, and all the way

      to the top you’d turn, face nothing but the water

      beneath you, then over you’d go—again

      and again—wrapped in the weathered chrysalis.

      I cannot say exactly what it was about that

      late April afternoon that won me over to the job,

      but I will be ever grateful for the detour.

      The God of glory thunders.

      Psalm 29:3

      Neighbor as Theologian

      How can she talk about a “word from God”?

      The weather, yes, or the fate of our hedge.

      A snake or the shrinking odds of her spouse

      beating cancer, sure. But a word from God?

      As though God were an actual person,

      albeit incomprehensibly vast.

      Yet this is how she talks, the way I talk

      about my son from whom I could never

      hear too much or too often, who’s only

      hours away in Brooklyn. Why, unless

      my sin were envy, would I begrudge her

      an assurance of contact? More likely,

      I long for what she has, embarrassed, pained

      by my lack of openness to mystery—

      which, she has told me, is wholly present

      in, with, and under the hedge between us.

      When you hid your face, I was dismayed.

      Psalm 30:7

      As It Is

      The face of God is hidden from me.

      I see only old walls, the clutter

      of familiar rooms, shelves of books, snapshots,

      mix-and-match decor. Awake or asleep

      and dreaming, no divine shook-foil glimmer

      for my inmost eye. Rumors reach me

      of others’ encounters—glimpses of His face—

      but after devouring these, the want

      remains. Is there some special training I need?

      Last week a friend confided that for years

      the Holy Ghost has shimmered inside her,

      every moment beatific. My resolve:

      to pretend my friend is not a liar

      or schizophrenic—and to seek new friends.

      He showed his wonderful love to me when I was in a besieged city.

      Psalm 31:21

      Putting a Name to the Face

      In Madagascar or Peru, St. Kitts

      or Tasmania, wherever children,

      despite suffering, find games to play

      or halt play to marvel at a column

      of clouds collecting on some horizon;

      wherever anyone takes care to make

      ready a back room for a visitor—

      sweep the floor for the ten-thousandth time,

      place a fresh flower on the pillow—there

      a glimpse, the face you know you know

      in a crowd of strangers who disappears

      before you get a fix on the distance

      between you—

       mercy!—

      and that face.

      Do not be like the horse or the mule which have no understanding.

      Psalm 32:9

      Brother Chronos

      Radio-controlled and programmed to check

      in every four hours with an atomic

      device deep in some bunker in Denver,

      my travel clock is more monk than truant

      on probation, for it desires correction,

      six times a day turns out toward the big

      unseen—receives it—then turns back

      to serving my fascination with time.

      No trumpet sounds to signal the clock’s

      connecting moment—a mute faithfulness

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