We stand on the Algarve cliffs looking out at the Atlantic.
My eyes are drawn far up and over the curve of the water,
and I have that strong sensation of homesickness,
for a place that is not my home.

The ocean is a conjurer of yearning,
and I am a paperback its waves leaf through.

My plot could be thicker, my lacunae narrower,
but I stand nonetheless,
with a mist of praise on my lips,
and watch the sun ascend through a burnt-orange brine,
while silver wisps of cloud court the morning,
and the mouths of yellow sea daisies open in devotion.

North, from the coast to the sheltered valleys of the barrocal,
the olive trees are nourishing themselves, preparing to bloom.
The citrus trees have seasoned, the roadsides are dotted
with wooden crates holding mesh bags, bulging with oranges,
lemons, you can pick from the car. Farther up the serra
are carob, almond, stone pine, and cork oak.

On a hill, cows graze beside a fallen castle, vines twine
over stone and moss-ruined mortar. Everything
but the Azores ivy is given over to gravity.

We drive through villages, walk their mazes of tiled alleys,
enter their sandstone chapels and vaulted churches —
much of the sacred imagery is lost on me.
But I am a tourist with vacationing eyes,
what do I know about the woman whose head is bowed?
whose hands are cupped in supplication, whose very body,
before the dark carving of Christ, is a depiction of prayer.

In the town squares are markets. We buy figs and fresh almonds;
sample port, red, tawny, ruby; we eat monkfish, cataplana
with cod and cockles, the lamb stew is questionable, but the sea bass
was caught this morning, and the wine is cheap and good.

I want to listen to Fado, that profoundly melancholic music
peculiar to Portugal. It would have paired well with the stew;
as would have the Neil Diamond impersonator in Albufeira.

Always, there are gothic cathedrals, soaring pointed arches,
flamboyant rose windows held in webs of stone tracery,
and towering belfries, where white storks copulate,
their considerable joys sound like faraway machine-gun fire.

We stroll the dark cloisters, enter the airless naves,
the apses, beyond decorative, yawn with gold-leaf opulence;
lavish statues, extravagant knotwork, the busts, the figurines,
altogether, none so rich as the deep ochre cliffs,
the sea, the sand, the sun, to where we’ll return.

– a falconry of seraphim
– the shrapnel of silence
– a stack of dark clouds
– a fistful of light
– a translucent mirror
These are basic tools for the mystic.

Mystics are not special.
Like all of us, they need coffee, go to the washroom,
get a little bitchy when one of their seven-times-a-day
gets interrupted.

We rightfully ask,
what use are they? what is their role?

It’s a question they love
to leave unanswered, as though that were the answer.

I befriended one once. I’m not sure what I was thinking.
I scolded myself: it’s not like getting a pet.

Like many, he was shoeless and profoundly homeless.
Living arrangements were not surprising, he only wanted a closet
in the basement.

We rarely spoke, which I anticipated. Once I asked him about his day.
“I deal in appearances and realities,” he said.

I said, “Reality is like my body, solid with water, and surface areas,
what’s more real than that?”

He was as quiet as Christ.
Then stepped through the closed door and went downstairs.

Later that year I saw him sitting on the front step, sipping air. I yelled,
“You have no idea! Up here it’s every organism for itself!”

“Follow me,” he said. We went downstairs.
He opened the closet. It was a madhouse of connections.

Just a week later he appeared in the grey of the evening,
while I was clearing dinner dishes.
“I have news from the edge,” he said, “none of us
are loved enough.”

I broke down.
He hugged me.
Then left my house.

I watched him
make his way down the sidewalk,
as he slowly vanished.

I sit in a café in the early hours.
I have no agenda, no manifesto, no religion that needs defending.

The morning sky is tangerine and tousled by clouds.
People are friendly.
No one has come here with that quote by Sartre.
No one is reading the principles of Sun Tzu.

Little Wing is playing through the overhead speakers.
Hints of frost on the large eastern window.
I’m warm in my Merino.
It’s February on the island. Snowdrops are up.

At a table beside me there’s a woman who is beautiful and plain.
I see the eyes of my mother — then I hear the voice of my father.
The woman glances up over her coffee, toward her partner,
a dark strand of hair, like a rush of love, falls across her cheek.

My memories are strands of wool, dropped and scattered over the earth.
I sit. Voices around me, like blessed water running over polished rock.

At a table near the back, I hear the glad cries of my sisters and brothers.
They are playing Rook, past midnight.
They are in me like piers in a port.

A trans woman enters who has the face of the Black Madonna.
Behind her, a mother, with a daughter whose midriff is exposed
and pierced with a jewel.
An old man in a wheelchair is sitting alone, with news.
A waiter is clearing and wiping a table and speaking softly
to a child, using the language of a child.
The nation’s flag is sewn on the brown jacket of a young man,
waiting for his Americano.
A business person, wearing straight lines and severe lipstick,
is waiting for some form of kindness.
An angel stands outside with his shopping cart and paper cup.
All of us here, like salt in a sea.
One in all, like coral; all in one, like the bride of Christ.

Before there were fists, there were open palms.
Even a gun was once an oak, and ore, gleaming from a cliff.

Tears of happiness well up in me,
the way brooks form on mountains after a day of rain,
the way a drop of love gathers more love.

Afterward, my eyes dry, I sit before my table.
It is built low and circular, like a bay prepared for boats
in some divine unfolding dream.

Who are you?
Who
Are you? Whose
Silence are you?   -Thomas Merton

What a short span you have, here
in your flesh and blood body.

Who will blame you, even at your age, especially
at your age, if you take your nerve and sinew
and set out to recover your soul?

Who’ll chide you for getting up, throwing on your coat, leaving
behind the screens of abstraction, the acid of acedia, the sucking ruts
of restlessness, to reach for the latch and step outside?

What’s stopping you from shaking off that persistent
darkness, that moon-shaped blankness, to turn,
again, and face the big canvas of your life?

There’s still time. Why not go to the meadow
and sit quietly with your paints?

Let the observer in you fade away,
let stillness soften the ridges of the judging mind,
let it melt your laminate shell, let
any slime of shame burn away
under a blazing sun,
let the growing tribe of losses run their wild course,
and give yourself to the tender arms of grace,
unfolding in the bear-hug of self-forgiveness.

Paint the motions of the meadow, enter the holy grass, the
keening willows, the kneeling trees, the fearless, dying, leaves,
the divine mystery, that abiding presence
you first saw in a puddle after a rain,
your child-eyes looking back at you,
with fierce curiosity.

You have no paintbrush?
Use your sprouting hands,
your raging gut and ragged spirit,
your greying, still pulsing, marrow,
your whole water and fire body.