as a newfound sun or a new-named land,
though she won’t spend,
and though she’s resistant
to corrosion, she’s so thin she could be bent
by hand. It’s not an icon but an impress,
though the gold’s the same. Less
use than a penny in the reaches
of my pocketbook, than God in the clutches
of an unbeliever,
but she’ll rule this wall forever,
deposed Irene iconodule,
who finished her poor life in exile, carding wool.
INCARNATIONAL THEOLOGY
after Jürgen Moltmann
God suffers in us, where love suffers,”
writes the theologian of the cross,
the fate awaiting all God’s lovers.
You are my beloved, says the Father
as his dove rips through clouds to bless
the Son with suffering. In us, where love suffers,
Christ’s ache throbs closer than a brother’s—
stabbing my breasts, my thighs, his loneliness,
the fate awaiting all God’s lovers.
God takes on flesh and thinks he’ll smother.
Reeling, obsessed, his heart a wilderness,
God’s a mess, suffering in me as I suffer
over a torn leaf, a tore-up man, the others
I’ve tried to love, shorn to the bone and luckless
as the Son. What fate’s awaiting all the lovers
who dwell in me as migraines, as a stutter
in the veins, whose loss grows in me like grass?
God suffers them gladly. In us, love suffers:
it’s the grace awaiting all God’s lovers.
WOAD
“Every word of the Lord written by the scribe
is a wound on Satan’s body.”—CASSIODORUS, 6TH CENTURY
Once thought lapis on the carpet page, mined
from an Afghani cave, this new-bruise clot
in the monk’s ink pot grew from Boudicca’s plot—
a naturalized weed from a box of black seeds found
with a blue dress in a burial mound.
Knobs of leaves that reeked like cabbage rot,
steeped and strained for Britons’ battle paint, wrought
the Gospels’ splotched knotwork, the monk’s dyed hand.
Gouged with quills, woad-hued blots beneath your hide,
Lucifer, who can understand your blues?
I can: the Lord invades my piece of sod
to set up a scriptorium, introduce
true indigo, and build a Roman road;
he knots my blue veins till I can’t refuse.
HIT
Hit was give to me,
the old people’s way of talking,
and hit’s a hit
sometimes. Sometimes hit
is plumb forgot
and I drop the “h”
that starts hillbilly,
hellfire, hateful,
hope. Sometimes hit
hits the back of my teeth
and fights hits way out
for hit’s been around
and hit’s tough:
hit’s Old English,
hit’s Middle, hit’s country,
hit will hit on you
all day long
if you’ll let hit.
When I hit the books
they tried to hit
hit out of me,
but hit’s been hit
below the belt
and above and hit
still ain’t hit
the sack. Sometimes
you can hit hit
like a nail on the head,
and sometimes hit
hits back.
VERNACULAR THEOLOGY: MECHTHILD OF MAGDEBURG
In the muddy stretch between the market and the church
a song flows from a tavern, and it soaks the roads
in melted gold; a girl picks flowers from the ditches,
and her lover’s kisses whisper in each broken stem;
the bells for vespers burn a gasp of sun
into the moon, into my chest, into the host.
And all of this happens in German—from my tongue,
German overspills, light lilting from itself onto the water.
When I pray, the prayer is German; when I love,
I love in German, and thus my Lover’s mouth replies.
And when I, weak as a wind-stroked dove,
love into silence, my silences are German,
and they are so nicely honeycombed.
I know no Latin. Nor does the girl who reads
the letters of her lover’s name in every coiling cloud;
or the maids who wash and kiss, with oils, the dead;
or my sisters who wind their thumbs
with thread as red as wine-drenched bread.
My Lover bestowed Latin—a tabernacle, a gilded chest—
to some servants; they write, tight-lipped,
the Bridegroom from his bed into a crypt.
They would lock him in their books and eat the key.
But he kissed German into me. He sings,
a burning mountain; he aches, a churning tree.
So a lofty crag yearns into stones: for he desires
to shatter into every tongue, not die, unbroken,
inside one. The end of Latin is where I begin,
where my Lover takes his shape. On the page,
in my mouth, such sweetness, crushed—
O German, you taste like a grape.
TO SWAN
If you won’t swear, you’ll have to swan.
Nana did it all day long.
She swanned at weather, swanned at news.
Her Bible told her it was wrong
to swear an oath before the Lord.
Granddaddy Range had said so, too
(when she was a foul-mouthed bride
and their marriage was new),
and so she swanned and cleaned,
swanned and canned, swanned and fanned,
while across town, Ena swore.
I swear she never swanned;
she swore she never cussed.
When Nana was in the nursing home,
her mind stretched big enough for anything,
she loved a good fuck you and a good goddamn.
Ena (who wouldn’t stop her swearing
for another dozen years)
sat by Nana, didn’t mutter even shit,
didn’t drop a goddamn tear,
but looked at Nana’s swan-white hair,
then looked at me, then at her hands,
as if by looking she could find
words as calm as swans, as grand.
ULTRAMARINE
Beyond the blue scum sea, miners assault
lazurite and pyrite, a blue-gold beam,
pry from limestone caverns the lapis seam
for the shade that painters’ patrons so exalt
to hem the Virgin’s mantle, foam the Vault
where she’s fixed like a lodestar or a gem.
Mixed with wax and turpentine, by the dram
this powdered stone costs more than gold or salt.
Stella Maris, Blue-Eyed Lady of the Whale-
Road, God tore your veil into the seas
that hide Leviathan’s blue fluke and flail,
the skies that hold the sailor’s compass
made of ice-trussed stars. You’re vessel of the swell,
and all the deep will be your swaddling clothes.
CROOKED AS A DOG’S HIND LEG
Yanking my lank hair into dog-ears,
my granny frowned at my cowlick’s
revolt against the comb, my part
looking like a dog’s shank
no matter what she did, crooked
as the dogtrot path
out the mountain county I left
with no ambitions to return,
rover-minded a
s my no-count granddaddy, crooking
down switchbacks that crack the earth
like the hard set of the mouth
women are born with where I’m from.
Their faces have a hundred ways to say
“Don’t go off,” “Your place is here,”
“Why won’t you settle down?”—
and I ignored them all like I was one
of their ingrate sons (jobless, thankless,
drugged up, petted to death), meandering
like a scapegrace in a ballad,
as a woman with no children likes to do,
as a woman with crooked roots knows she can.
“When you coming home?” my granny
would ask when I called, meaning “to visit”
but meaning more “to stay,”
and how could I tell her
that the creeks crisscrossing
our tumbledown ridges
are ropes trying to pull my heart straight
when it’s a crooked muscle,
its blood crashing in circles?
Why should I tell her
that since I was a mop-headed infant
and leapt out of my baby bed,
I’ve been bent on skipping
the country, glad as a chained-up hound
until I slipped my rigging?
What could I say but “I’ll be home Christmas,”
what could I hear but “That’s a long time,”
what could I do but bless
the crooked teeth in my head
and dog the roads that lead all ways
but one?
ALL CREATION WEPT
And not just those disciples
whom he loved, and not just
his mother; for all creation
was his mother, if he shared
his cells with worms and ferns
and whales, silt and spiderweb,
with the very walls of his crypt.
Of all creation, only he slept,
the rest awake and rapt with grief
when love’s captain leapt
onto the cross, into an abyss
the weather hadn’t dreamt.
Hero mine the beloved,
cried snowflakes, cried the moons
of unknown planets, cried the thorns
in his garland, the nails bashed
through his bones, the spikes of dry grass
on the hillside, dotted with water
and with blood—real tears,
and not a trick of rain-light
blinked and blurred onto a tree
so that the tree seems wound
in gold. It was not wound
in gold or rain but in a rapture
of salt, the wood splintering
as he splintered when he wept
over Lazarus, over Jerusalem,
until his sorrow became his action,
his grief his victory—
until his tears became a rupture
in nature, all creation
discipled to his suffering
on the gilded gallows-tree,
the wood which broke beneath the weight
of love, though it had no ears to hear
him cry out, and no eyes to see.
THE GIANTS’ SWORD MELTS
Beowulf, 1605–1617
If all metal once were water,
if all water once could cut the skin—
if the edge could withstand the blood,
could turn aside its face,
could still ask, now can you guess my name?,
would it ask it in the giants’ tongue?
Or in the tongue of ice, of layers
of glaciers melted to a silver point,
a blade of barrow-light, a drop
of sun that once shone on a tale
of men as tall as trees? And like trees
they towered terribly, like trees
they stretched to scathe the sky,
this sky of scalding waves.
Who put you there, ice-brand
heavy as a mother’s tongue
when she has lost her son?
Who scratched a flood onto your hilt?
Who committed to your melted steel
a spell, a tale terrific strange
in runes that once were songs,
the singers’ voices fetters of frost,
the script not the real story,
the real story water-bands loosening, lost?
GOLD LEAF
the Gospel Book of Otto III, ca. 10th century
Shines forth from the vellum this film of sun,
the precious metal pounded thick as air,
then bound to the page with gesso or with glair—
more than one hundred leaves of gold from one
ducat. Otto, on the gold-leaf throne
which he commissioned—servant of Christ, ruler
of the world—surveys his gilded empire,
and the hand of God adjusts his crown.
O Christ, how I have loved you, with my heart shut
like an emperor’s fist or a golden door,
a Bible with its pages locked up tight.
In my poverty I sought a poor God to adore,
a love I could buy with my widow’s mite.
But this is not a Bible for the poor.
CENTO: NATURAL THEOLOGY
Hildegard of Bingen, 12th century
Partly like the sun and partly like the air,
the earth—just like a body
if it had no bones. As if by veins
it is held together so it does not crumble.
Like a lamb sucking milk, the plants
suck up the green; place the emerald
in their mouth and the spirit will revive,
a fire of burning mountains
which is difficult to put out,
like the thunder’s eye. It cannot be caught.
It ministers to those who bear it,
coming from the mystery of God
like limestone from stone, one drop
of dew found on clean grass. All its matter
is from the fresh greenness of the air,
the sharpness of the water, flame
in the heavens. God does not wish to cure it.
REGIONALISM
People mock the South wherever I pass through.
It’s so racist, so backward, so NASCAR.
I don’t hate it, but they all do.
As if they themselves marched out in blue,
they’re still us-themming it about the Civil War,
mocking the South, wherever it is (they’ve never passed through).
It’s a formless humid place with bad food (except for BBQ)—
the grits, slick boiled peanuts, sweet tea thick as tar.
I don’t hate it, but they all do,
though they love Otis Redding, Johnny Cash, the B-52s.
The rest of it can go ahead and char.
People mock my Southern mouth wherever I pass through,
my every “might could have” and “fixin’ to,”
my flattened vowels that make “fire” into “far.”
I don’t hate how I talk, where I’m from, but they all do
their best to make me. It’s their last yahoo
in a yahooing world of smear, slur, and mar.
People mock the South, its past. They’re never through.
I’m damned if I don’t hate it, and damned if I do.
SCRIPTORIUM
Before the stepwork and the fretwork,
before the first wet spiral leaves the brush,
before the plucking of the geese’s quills,
before the breaking of a thousand leads,
before the curving limbs and wings
of hounds, cats, and cormorants
knot into letters, before the letters knot
into the Word, Eadfrith ventures from his cell,
reed basket on his arm, past Cuth
bert’s grave,
past the stockyard where the calves’ cries bell,
and their blood illuminates the dirt as ink
on vellum, across the glens and woods
to gather woad and lichens, to the shores
to gather shells. The earth, not the cell,
is his scriptorium, where he might see
the interlace of branch and twig and leaf;
how green bleeds brown when fields are plowed;
how green banks blue where grass gives way to sea;
how blue twists into white in swirling lines
purling through the water and the sky.
Before the skinning of a hundred calves,
before the stretching and the scraping of their hides,
before the boiling vinegar, the toasting lead,
the bubbling orpiment and verdigris,
before the glair cracks from the egg,
before the monk perfects his recipe
(egg white, oak-gall, iron salt, mixed
in a tree-stump, some speculate)
to make the pigments glorious to the Lord,
before Eadfrith’s fingers are permanently stained
the colors of his world—crimson, emerald,
cerulean, gold—outside the monastery walls,
in the village, with its brown hounds
spooking yellow cats stalking green-black birds,
on the purple-bitten lips of peasants
his gospel’s corruption already sings forth
in vermilion ink, firebrands on a red calf’s hide—
though he’ll be dead before the Vikings sail,
and two centuries of men and wars
will pass before his successor Aldred
pierces Eadfrith’s text with thorn,
ash, and all the other angled letters
of his gloss. Laced between the lines of Latin,
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