Days pass when I forget the mystery. Problems insoluble and problems offering their own ignored solutions jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing their colored clothes; cap and bells.
And then once more the quiet mystery is present to me, the throng’s clamor recedes: the mystery that there is anything, anything at all, let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, rather than void: and that, O Lord, Creator, Hallowed One, You still, hour by hour sustain it.
O Sweet Irrational Worship, By Thomas Merton
Wind and a bobwhite And the afternoon sun.
By ceasing to question the sun I have become light,
Bird and wind.
My leaves sing.
I am earth, earth
All these lighted things Grow from my heart.
A tall, spare pine Stands like the initial of my first Name when I had one.
When I had a spirit, When I was on fire When this valley was Made out of fresh air You spoke my name In naming Your silence: O sweet, irrational worship!
I am earth, earth
My heart’s love Bursts with hay and flowers. I am a lake of blue air In which my own appointed place Field and valley Stand reflected.
When I first fell in love, it was a hot thing—urgent, possessive, almost feverish at times. I truly saw love as being two souls in one body. We were opposites that complemented each other. He was my missing half, and I his.
But I wasn’t content with that. In some fervent way I wanted to be him, become him, live inside him, feel my heart beating in his body and his in mine. I wanted to meld with him.
Not surprisingly, I discovered this just wasn’t happening. There were times when our love felt like that, when we seemed so close, but then it would slacken and drift away. And when that happened, he seemed almost like a stranger to me, someone I barely knew, and did not understand at all.
That’s when I wrote the following poem.
Love’s Duplicity
I look at you and see Incredibly A face at once slighted by closeness, yet Dimmed by the distance I hold you; A face overlooked and over known, yet Laced by fingers, fearful to possess you. And you look from eyes Half-halting Wary that you know me.
I look at you and see Incredibly, How the lines forming you Flow not into my own But lie separately, falling On planes apart. Reasoning makes no clearer, No nearer That we lie two, not one.
I look at you and see Incredibly, How the brown hollow of your eyes Will ever haunt mine, and I cry for me, for all whose heart’s desire Is held ever at half embrace: Half wanting, half waiting, Half knowing What we’ll never know.
I look at you and see Incredibly, How these feelings we are one Or we should be, How we are strangers Never touching, Lie at odds in me. Is it odd I reap of love the bittersweet?
Eventually I realized we weren’t soul mates and probably never would be. And while I still yearned for us to become closer, he was content with the way things were.
While I wanted to know everything about him, there were parts of me—important parts—that he simply had no interest in. Like my passion for the arts, literature, philosophy, religion, writing. He knew I wanted to be a writer—that I wrote poetry and short stories and kept a journal—and he liked that about me. But he had no interest in what I was writing, never asked to read anything. Never seemed interested when I offered to share what I wrote. He wasn’t curious at all.
Finally, I let go trying to become closer, and we drifted away from each other. Our marriage became almost sterile, perfunctory. We shared a house, children, a bed. That was all. I realized that I no longer loved him. At times I barely liked him.
A veil of sadness descended over me, a yearning for something I feared I would never have. I felt my soul mate was still out there somewhere, waiting for me. But I realized I may never find him.
The following poem expresses that feeling of waiting for something that may never happen. It was originally published in a college journal.
Hot Hills in Summer Heat
I watch them every summer, the hot hills
Crouched like a lion beside the road,
Tawny skin pulled taut across
Long, lean ribs.
I would take my hand and trace
Round ripples of male muscle,
Feel the hot rise and cool dip
of his body.
I see the arrogance—rocky head held
High against a blazing sky, the patient
Power unmindful of the heat
that holds me.
One day he will rise, stretch his sensuous
Body against the sky with one, low moan.
On silent paws he will pursue me.
And so I wait.
by Deborah J. Brasket
We’d been married ten years by then, but I felt I could no longer live like this. It was time for me to leave.
(To be continued) In celebration of April as National Poetry Month and our 50th wedding anniversary (yes, I was a child bride), I’ll be reposting a series I published here years ago,an anatomy of love as it evolves over time, exploring married love in all of its manifestations: Innocent love,erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts.
In celebration of April as National Poetry Month and our 50th wedding anniversary (yes, I was a child bride), I’ll be reposting a series I published here years ago,an anatomy of love as it evolves over time, exploring married love in all of its manifestations: Innocent love, erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts.
Part II – The Geometry and Geography of Love
I wrote these poems while still quite young, and very much in love, and loving the way our bodies “meet and mingle” when making love. I loved the “lean lines” and “anxious angles,” the patterns we made spread across the bed.
I was fascinated by how the masculine and feminine forms complemented each other. It inspired the following drawing, something I was playing around with at the time, enjoying the lean look of pen on paper.
A Pleasing Design
I find satisfaction in form, In bare geometric patterns, In line upon line bisecting line, In spacious planes spread out and open.
I like this silky stretch of skin, Simple curves and supple cones, I like the firm feel of your flesh, Swollen contours, anxious angles.
Mostly I like the intricate pattern We create, stripped bare and essential The piling planes and lacing lines, The way we meet and mingle,
When one fine ray of you cuts Clean through me, and within that intersecting interlude we come To a common and satisfying point.
By Deborah J. Brasket
Several love poems I wrote at the time involves the “topography” or “geography” of love, exploring each other’s bodies as if exploring an intimate landscape, with all its hills and streams, forests and caves, and vast flowing deserts.
Even then, so long ago, I was fascinated by how the human and natural worlds interconnect, and seem to complement each other.
In Exploration
I like the lay of your land.
You stretch before me in large and rugged proportions.
The sheer volume of your mass with its vast and varied landscape is an irresistible invitation to explore you.
You are shaped of firm and fertile earth pressed lovingly round solid granite.
I lay my face close to smell the sweet and salty scent of you And there I hear low, deep rumblings of subterranean waters.
I trace you with my finger to find Sudden softness, deep impenetrable forests, and parts of you so finely chiseled I must stop and marvel.
When I touch you my hand spans continents, for there’s no lusher garden, no sweeter field, no depth more resounding, nor peak more pure than what I find in touching you.
I rise and hover over you like a cloud then slowly, gently, cover you with my body. I feel the touch of skin on skin, your warmth rising through me and press so near I hear Your heartbeat in my body.
I am spilling with the rich fill of you, Knowing all my sweet and wild secrets lie Ever open to the finger of exploration.
Then I find within the far-off orb of your eye a space so vast and distant, and long to explore the intangible reaches of your mind.
In celebration of April as National Poetry Month and our 50th wedding anniversary (yes, I was a child bride), I’ll be reposting a series I published here years ago,an anatomy of love as it evolves over time, exploring married love in all of its manifestations: Innocent love, erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts.
Part I, Some Silly Little Love Poems, Loosed at Last
He was a young handsome marine, fresh from his tour of duty in Vietnam. I was senior in high school, a flower-child who wrote poetry and read Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. We were the opposites that attract. I dropped out of school to marry him because he had to move away for work and I couldn’t live without him. But as an Ironworker building bridges and topping off sky-scrapers, his work kept taking him away from me. And as a freshman in college with a baby on the way, I could not follow, so we were constantly being parted. I wrote these poems to mourn his absence and celebrate love’s sweetness. The last one shows too the fear I felt of losing him forever, for his work on the high iron was so dangerous. These poems lay in a drawer for decades till published here.
Now, While
Now While the love-light of your eyes Shines upon my face, And your bare-bodied shadow Presses close to mine,
Now With the moonlight and trees Spreading patterns across our bed, And the corners of the room lie dark and drowsy,
Now Let us kiss and love.
Then While our bodies still hungrily cling Let us sleep,
Closely breathing, Closely dreaming, Close in love.
Gone
You’re gone! And though I know You’ll be back Monday The word gets caught between The empty of my arms
Just Asking
We loved We came to be like Mirrors, reflecting like
I saw myself An image in your eye.
When you’re gone I find myself And empty likeness
I question, are you gone Or am I?
Would That Love
Would that love move me once That it move me far enough Would that love move me now In all I do.
For the way is far too strong That would push against the throng, Cut me loose to lose myself In loving you.
Since the day will surely show When I’ll have to let you go What a waste to love you then With clutching arms.
So let me meet your every wish Make myself a selfless gift That I fill to overflowing Loving you.
And when we part, if part we must, I’ll unclasp in loving trust, For Love spent us to the full In every way.
To live content with small things;
To seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion;
To be worthy, not respectable;
To listen to stars and birds, and to babes with an open heart;
To bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasion, hurry never –
In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious grow up through the common. — William Henry Channing
love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star
— e.e.cummings
We sit together,
the mountain & I
. . . until only the
mountain remains.
— Li Po
While neither of these poems have anything in particular to do with remembering those who have given their lives to defend our freedoms, they are reminders that death is not an ending but another beginning. So my heartfelt prayer for them is that they fell into the arms of that great Mothering and are being nurtured and renewed there.
Farewell Letter to My Son
She wrote me a letter
after her death
and I remember
a kind of happy light
falling on the envelope
as I sat by the rose tree
on her old bench
at the back door,
so surprised by its arrival
wondering what she would say,
looking up before I could open it
and laughing to myself
in silent expectation.
Dear son, it is time
for me to leave you.
I am afraid that the words
you are used to hearing
are no longer mine to give,
they are gone and mingled
back in the world
where it is no longer
in my power
to be their first
original author
not their last loving bearer.
You can hear
motherly
words of affection now
only from your own mouth
and only
when you speak them
to those
who stand
motherless
before you.
As for me I must forsake
adulthood
and be bound gladly
to a new childhood.
You must understand
this apprenticeship
demands of me
an elemental innocence
from everything
I ever held in my hands.
I know your generous soul
is well able to let me go
you will in the end
be happy to know
my God was true
and I find myself
after loving you all so long,
in the wide,
infinite mercy
of being mothered myself.
P.S. All your intuitions are true.
By David Whyte
To Leave One’s Own Name Behind
Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to give up customs one barely had time to learn,
not to see roses and other promising Things
in terms of a human future; no longer to be
what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave
even one’s own first name behind, forgetting it
as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
Strange to no longer desire one’s desires. Strange
to see meanings that clung together once, floating away
in every direction. And being dead is hard work
and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel
a trace of eternity. – Though the living are wrong to believe
in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created.
Angels (they say) don’t know whether it is the living
they are moving among, or the dead. The eternal torrent
whirls all ages along in it, through both realms
forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar
By Rainer Maria Rilke
from Duino Elegies, The first Elegy
translation by Stephen Mitchell
I found both of these poems and the photo by Edward Steichen on Beauty We Love, a wonderful source of inspiration I turn to often.
I’ve long been a huge fan of Paul Klee’s paintings and e.e. cummings’ poetry, and for similar reasons: their playfulness and sense of excitement, as if “bursting with something very important and precise to say.,” as one critic writes of cummings’ work.
They dared to take their art in new and often jarring directions, playing with syntax and form, with color and composition. The reader/viewer is forced to see things in a new way. To question old ways of looking at the world.
Beneath the playfulness, something deeper is going on. Each bends toward the light.
“Everything passes, and what remains of former times, what remains of life, is the spiritual. In everything we do, the claim of the Absolute is unchanging.” – Paul Klee
“Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star.” – e.e. cummings
A few favorites of each follows.
[in Just-]
BY E. E. CUMMINGS
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it’s
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
By E. E. Cummings, 1894 – 1962
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands
May you and your loved ones, near and far, have a Blessed Thanksgiving.
blessing the boats
BY LUCILLE CLIFTON
(at St. Mary’s)
may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that
— From Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000.
The Dead
BY BILLY COLLINS
The dead are always looking down on us, they say.
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.
They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a long afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.
— From Sailing Alone Around the Room. (Random House September 17th 2002)
Art by Odilon Redon, “Final Journey, Soul Guardians”
Deborah J. Brasket 
