THE FIVE SENSES: MEDITATION IN A CHAPEL

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SIGHT

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The cold scroll of stones.
Traceries of tortured iron.
Slices of glass: Chartres blue,
blood of the Crusaders, aquamarine.
Dazzling as the press-on plastic jewels
loved by little princesses. Chips 
of kaleidoscope glass.

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SCENT

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Is there a scent more heavenly than bread
baking, yeast doing its doubling act,
that magic trick of turning flour, water, salt,
most basic of elements, into crust and crumb,
something that makes butter lose its cool edges,
soften, sigh?

 

TASTE

 

What the mouth desires is salty and sweet,
crunchy and soft at the same time,
a marriage of opposites whispering both.

 

SOUND

 

What the ears, with their whorls and scrolls
require, may not be words with their multiple
meanings, content and context, babble and squawk,
but their opposite, silence. The deep quiet of a church
with no people, a street with no traffic, a café
with just the kiss of an espresso machine. A garden
with a trickle of bird song. Rain on the roof.

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TOUCH

 

Cool wood in the pews, rough hew in the stones,
smooth glass in the windows. Wings

of a butterfly powdering fingers. The clasp
of a baby’s fist, the sweet certainty of security.
The rough texture of doubt.

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SPARROWS

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I never learned to tell one from another—
swamp, field, song, vesper—all scraps
of drab: rust, dun, buff, tan. Some streaky-breasted,
some not. We hear the flutter of wings, look up, 
then yawn, ho hum, a sparrow. No rush
for binoculars. Like the poor, they are always with us. 
Look at them flick and flit in this dry meadow of foxtail,
switchgrass, goldenrod; every leaf, stem, and seedhead 
burnished in the dying light. Maybe they are the only angels
we get in this life. But the very hairs on our head are numbered, 
and the father knows them all by name. Each sparrow, too, has a song—
no flashy cardinal selling cheer, no sky-blue jay's ironic squawk, 
no eponymous chicka-dee-dee-dee. Just us, the unnoticed, gleaning 
what others have left behind, and singing for all we're worth, teetering 
on a bit of bracken at the edge of a wild field.

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WALKING WITH JESUS

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in the Blue Ridge Mountains, eating corn fritters
and okra, passing the black-eyed peas. He loves
redbirds and kudzu, all that green tenaciousness.
He’s not so much of a fan of men in white sheets,
gun racks, the Stars and Bars, but he’s Jesus, so
he loves them anyway. The gospel of football
eludes him, but he sure likes to tailgate. He tells
me that all the commandments are really
about sitting with your neighbors on a wide
front porch, eating peach pie, watching the sun
go down. Why are you still going on about sin
and salvation, he asks me, when you have all this,
right here, right now?

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BOOK OF KELLS

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October 19, 2013: folio 253v-254r

 

The text of the day is open to Luke, chapter sixteen,
verse ten. The initial N, made up of blonde men

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facing off, grappling and tugging at each other’s beards,
becomes the first word in the section that warns us

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that no servant can serve two masters. Irony intended.
Later, in beautiful insular majuscule, the open letters filled 

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in red and blue, we read You cannot serve both god and money.
I wish that these words would rise off the page, a swarm of bees, 

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become honey to spread on our daily bread. When the scribes 
made an error, in a world before white-out, the correct word

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was inserted in a box of red dots. Aren’t there words today 
we’d like to amend like that? In this dimly lit room, circling

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glass cases, I return to view the same vellum over again.
Twelve hundred years later, clear as the day it was written,

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I think of Henri Nouwen: The word is born in silence, 
and silence is the deepest response to the word. 
 

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ANGELS

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One set of scholars believes the Book of Kells 
was created to honor the 200th anniversary 
of the death of Colum Cille (St. Columba).
 

In the Book of Kells, messengers are both seen and unseen: 
framing the Virgin at the Nativity in all four corners; 
the infant Christ, dressed as a small man, fully clothed, 
on his mother’s knee. The angel in the upper left 
seems to be saying Oh, my God. What have you done? 
Do you really think this was a good idea?
The one on the upper right seems resigned. You want
to send him where? While the two on the bottom, crowded
behind Mary’s chair, seem dwarfed by the occasion, relegated
to the corners. But they’re always there. I like the angels
on the arm of the chi in the great Chi Rho; you have to tilt
the page to see them, unflagrant, hovering above.  
And some angels are almost hidden, like the one
in folio 48r, hands outstretched in prayer, framed 
in the diamond-shaped O of Omnia. I wonder what 
it would have been like to live then, in the time 
of Colum Cille, when angels might have been hovering
in the breathable air?

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Author's Note:

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"SPARROWS" was previously published in Some Glad Morning (Pitt Poetry Series,

2019).

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"WALKING WITH JESUS" was previously published in Les Fauves (C&R Press, 2018).

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"BOOK OF KELLS" and "ANGELS" were previously published in The Book of Kells 

(Cascade Books, 2018).