The Stream & the Sapphire

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by Denise Levertov


  up within tall towers

  of learning, steeples of discourse.

  Bells in her spirit

  rang new changes.

  Swept beyond event, one longing

  outstripped all others: that reality,

  supreme reality,

  be witnessed. To desire wounds—

  three, no less, no more—

  is audacity, not, five centuries early, neurosis;

  it’s the desire to enact metaphor, for flesh to make known

  to intellect (as uttered song

  makes known to voice,

  as image to eye)

  make known in bone and breath

  (and not die) God’s agony.

  3

  ‘To understand her, you must imagine…’

  A childhood, then;

  the dairy’s bowls of clabber, of rich cream,

  ghost-white in shade, and outside

  the midsummer gold, humming of dandelions.

  To run back and forth, into the chill again,

  the sweat of slate, a cake of butter

  set on a green leaf—out once more

  over slab of stone into hot light, hot

  wood, the swinging gate!

  A spire we think ancient split the blue

  between two trees, a half-century old —

  she thought it ancient.

  Her father’s hall, her mother’s bower,

  nothing was dull. The cuckoo

  was changing its tune. In the church

  there was glass in the windows, glass

  colored like the world. You could see

  Christ and his mother and his cross,

  you could see his blood, and the throne of God.

  In the fields

  calves were lowing, the shepherd was taking the sheep

  to new pasture.

  Julian perhaps

  not yet her name, this child’s

  that vivid woman.

  4

  God’s wounded hand

  reached out to place in hers

  the entire world, ‘round as a ball,

  small as a hazelnut.’ Just so one day

  of infant light remembered

  her mother might have given

  into her two cupped palms

  a newlaid egg, warm from the hen;

  just so her brother

  risked to her solemn joy

  his delicate treasure,

  a sparrow’s egg from the hedgerow.

  What can this be? the eye of her understanding marveled.

  God for a moment in our history

  placed in that five-fingered

  human nest

  the macrocosmic egg, sublime paradox,

  brown hazelnut of All that Is—

  made, and belov’d, and preserved.

  As still, waking each day within

  our microcosm, we find it, and ourselves.

  5 Chapter Thirteen

  Why did she laugh?

  In scorn of malice.

  What did they think?

  They thought she was dying.

  They caught her laugh?

  Even the priest—

  the dark small room

  quivered with merriment,

  all unaccountably

  lightened.

  If they had known

  What she was seeing—

  the very

  spirit of evil,

  the Fiend they dreaded,

  seen to be oafish, ridiculous, vanquished—

  what amazement! Stupid,

  stupid his mar-plot malevolence!

  Silly as his horns and

  imaginary tail!

  Why did her laughter

  stop? Her mind moved on:

  the cost, the cost,

  the passion it took to undo

  the deeds of malice.

  The deathly

  wounds and the anguished

  heart.

  And they?

  They were abashed,

  stranded in hilarity.

  But when she recovered,

  they told one another:

  ‘Remember how we laughed

  without knowing why?

  That was the turning-point!’

  6

  Julian laughing aloud, glad

  with a most high inward happiness,

  Julian open calmly to dismissive judgments

  flung backward down the centuries—

  ‘delirium,’ ‘hallucination’;

  Julian walking underwater

  on the green hills of moss, the detailed sand and seaweed,

  pilgrim of the depths, unfearing;

  twenty years later carefully retelling

  each unfading vision, each

  pondered understanding;

  Julian of whom we know

  she had two serving-maids, Alice and Sara,

  and kept a cat, and looked God in the face

  and lived—

  Julian nevertheless

  said that deeds are done so evil, injuries inflicted

  so great, it seems to us

  impossible any good

  can come of them—

  any redemption, then, transform them …

  She lived in dark times, as we do:

  war, and the Black Death, hunger, strife,

  torture, massacre. She knew

  all of this, she felt it

  sorrowfully, mournfully,

  shaken as men shake

  a cloth in the wind.

  But Julian, Julian—

  I turn to you:

  you clung to joy though tears and sweat

  rolled down your face like the blood

  you watched pour down in beads uncountable

  as rain from the eaves:

  clung like an acrobat, by your teeth, fiercely,

  to a cobweb-thin high-wire, your certainty

  of infinite mercy, witnessed

  with your own eyes, with outward sight

  in your small room, with inward sight

  in your untrammeled spirit—

  knowledge we long to share:

  Love was his meaning.

  Annunciatión

  ‘Hail, space for the uncontained God’

  From the Agathistos Hymn,

  Greece, Vle

  We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,

  almost always a lectern, a book; always

  the tall lily.

  Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,

  the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,

  whom she acknowledges, a guest.

  But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions

  courage.

  The engendering Spirit

  did not enter her without consent.

  God waited.

  She was free

  to accept or to refuse, choice

  integral to humanness.

  _____________________

  Aren’t there annunciations

  of one sort or another

  in most lives?

  Some unwillingly

  undertake great destinies,

  enact them in sullen pride,

  uncomprehending.

  More often

  those moments

  when roads of light and storm

  open from darkness in a man or woman,

  are turned away from

  in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair

  and with relief.

  Ordinary lives continue.

  God does not smite them.

  But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

  _____________________

  She had been a child who played, ate, slept

  like any other child—but unlike others,

  wept only for pity, laughed

  in joy not triumph.

  Compassion and intelligence

  fused in her, indivisible.

  Called to a destiny more momentous

  th
an any in all of Time,

  she did not quail,

  only asked

  a simple, ‘How can this be?’

  and gravely, courteously,

  took to heart the angel’s reply,

  perceiving instantly

  the astounding ministry she was offered:

  to bear in her womb

  Infinite weight and lightness; to carry

  in hidden, finite inwardness,

  nine months of Eternity; to contain

  in slender vase of being,

  the sum of power—

  in narrow flesh,

  the sum of light.

  Then bring to birth,

  push out into air, a Man-child

  needing, like any other,

  milk and love—

  but who was God.

  PART THREE

  Conjectures

  On the Parables of the Mustard Seed

  (Mathew 17.20, Mark 4.30—32,

  Luke 13.8—19)

  Who ever saw the mustard-plant,

  wayside weed or tended crop,

  grow tall as a shrub, let alone a tree, a treeful

  of shade and nests and songs?

  Acres of yellow,

  not a bird of the air in sight.

  No, He who knew

  the west wind brings

  the rain, the south wind

  thunder, who walked the field-paths

  running His hand along wheatstems to glean

  those intimate milky kernels, good

  to break on the tongue,

  was talking of miracle, the seed

  within us, so small

  we take it for worthless, a mustard-seed, dust,

  nothing.

  Glib generations mistake

  the metaphor, not looking at fields and trees,

  not noticing paradox. Mountains

  remain unmoved.

  Faith is rare, He must have been saying,

  prodigious, unique—

  one infinitesimal grain divided

  like loaves and fishes,

  as if from a mustard-seed

  a great shade-tree grew. That rare,

  that strange: the kingdom

  a tree. The soul

  a bird. A great concourse of birds

  at home there, wings among yellow flowers.

  The waiting

  kingdom of faith, the seed

  waiting to be sown.

  What the Figtree Said

  Literal minds! Embarrassed humans! His friends

  were blushing for Him

  in secret; wouldn’t admit they were shocked.

  They thought Him

  petulant to curse me! —yet how could the Lord

  be unfair? — so they looked away,

  then and now.

  But I, I knew that

  helplessly barren though I was,

  my day had come. I served

  Christ the Poet,

  who spoke in images: I was at hand,

  a metaphor for their failure to bring forth

  what is within them (as figs

  were not within me). They who had walked

  n His sunlight presence,

  they could have ripened,

  could have perceived His thirst and hunger,

  His innocent appetite;

  they could have offered

  human fruits — compassion, comprehension —

  without being asked,

  without being told of need.

  My absent fruit

  stood for their barren hearts. He cursed

  not me, not them, but

  (ears that hear not, eyes that see not)

  their dullness, that withholds

  gifts unimagined.

  A Heresy

  When God makes dust of our cooling magma,

  musingly crumbling the last

  galls and studs of our being,

  the only place we can go if we’re not

  destined for hell, or there already,

  is purgatory—for certainly heaven’s

  no place for a film of dust to settle;

  and I see no reason why purgatory

  may not be reincarnation, the soul

  passing from human to another

  earth-form more innocent—even to try

  the human again, ablaze

  with outsetting infant wonder—from which

  to learn, as expiation progressed,

  neglected tasks.

  Then

  the sifting again, between thoughtful fingers,

  the rubbing to finer substance.

  Then perhaps

  time for the floating

  into light,

  to rest suspended

  mote by silvery mote

  in that bright veil to await

  the common resurrection.

  PART FOUR

  Fish and a Honeycomb

  Salvator Mundi: Via Crucis

  Maybe He looked indeed

  much as Rembrandt envisioned Him

  in those small heads that seem in fact

  portraits of more than a model.

  A dark, still young, very intelligent face,

  a soul-mirror gaze of deep understanding, unjudging.

  That face, in extremis, would have clenched its teeth

  in a grimace not shown in even the great crucifixions.

  The burden of humanness (I begin to see) exacted from Him

  that He taste also the humiliation of dread,

  cold sweat of wanting to let the whole thing go,

  like any mortal hero out of his depth,

  like anyone who has taken a step too far

  nd wants herself back.

  The painters, even the greatest, don’t show how,

  in the midnight Garden,

  or staggering uphill under the weight of the Cross,

  He went through with even the human longing

  to simply cease, to not be.

  Not torture of body,

  not the hideous betrayals humans commit

  or the faithless weakness of friends, and surely

  not the anticipation of death (not then, in agony’s grip)

  was Incarnation’s heaviest weight,

  but this sickened desire to renege,

  to step back from what He, Who was God,

  had promised Himself and had entered

  time and flesh to enact.

  Sublime acceptance, to be absolute, had to have welled

  up from those depths where purpose

  drifted for mortal moments.

  On a Theme from Julian’s Chapter XX

  Six hours outstretched in the sun, yes,

  hot wood, the nails, blood trickling

  into the eyes, yes—

  but the thieves on their neighbor crosses

  survived till after the soldiers

  had come to fracture their legs, or longer.

  Why single out this agony? What’s

  a mere six hours?

  Torture then, torture now,

  the same, the pain’s the same,

  immemorial branding iron,

  electric prod.

  Hasn’t a child

  dazed in the hospital ward they reserve

  for the most abused, known worse?

  This air we’re breathing,

  these very clouds, ephemeral billows

  languid upon the sky’s

  moody ocean, we share

  with women and men who’ve held out

  days and weeks on the rack—

  and in the ancient dust of the world

  what particles

  of the long tormented,

  what ashes.

  But Julian’s lucid spirit leapt

  to the difference:

  perceived why no awe could measure

  that brief day’s endless length,

  why among all the tortured

  One only is ‘King of Grief.’

  The oneing, she saw,
the oneing

  with he Godhead opened Him utterly

  to the pain of all minds, all bodies.

  —sands of the sea, of the desert—

  from first beginning

  to last day. The great wonder is

  that the human cells of His flesh and bone

  didn’t explode

  when utmost Imagination rose

  in that flood of knowledge. Unique

  in agony, Infinite strength, Incarnate,

  empowered Him to endure

  inside of history,

  through those hours when He took to Himself

  he sum total of anguish and drank

  even the lees of that cup:

  within the mesh of the web, Himself

  woven within it, yet seeing it,

  seeing it whole. Every sorrow and desolation

  He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.

  Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell

  Down through the tomb’s inward arch

  He has shouldered out into Limbo

  to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber:

  the merciful dead, the prophets,

  the innocents just His own age and those

  unnumbered others waiting here

  unaware, in an endless void He is ending

  now, stooping to tug at their hands,

  to pull them from their sarcophagi,

  dazzled, almost unwilling. Didmas,

  neighbor in death, Golgotha dust

  still streaked on the dried sweat of his body

  no one had washed and anointed, is here,

  for sequence is not known in Limbo;

  the promise, given from cross to cross

  at noon, arches beyond sunset and dawn.

  All these He will swiftly lead

  to the Paradise road: they are safe.

  That done, there must take place that struggle

  no human presumes to picture:

  living, dying, descending to rescue the just

  from shadow, were lesser travails

  than this: to break

  through earth and stone of the faithless world

  back to the cold sepulchre, tearstained

  stifling shroud; to break from them

  back into breath and heartbeat, and walk

  the world again, closed into days and weeks again,

  wounds of His anguish open, and Spirit

  streaming through every cell of flesh

  so that if mortal sight could bear

  to perceive it, it would be seen

  His mortal flesh was lit from within, now,

  and aching for home. He must return,

  first, in Divine patience, and know

  hunger again, and give

  to humble friends the joy

  of giving Him food—fish and a honeycomb.

  Lent 1988

  On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus

  It is for all

 

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