Without an element of atheism, no religion can be credible. -Fanny Howe

for all our days pass away;
our years come to an end like a sigh. -Psalm 90

in them the divine mystery . . . .
the same old beautiful mystery. -Walt Whitman

now: a little trouble at the heart
shallows at the lungs
a cold draft in my bones
my skin is giving up
the light in my eye
once an incandescent furnace
now relies on reflection from an outside source
like an LED screen
it’s like the future is watching my wincing approach
i’m a pressed relic of flower power
but history calls me to wander

then: i was a student of rebellion
a mocker of mortgages
a piqued critic of the status quo
an acolyte of Timothy Leary
turned on, tuned in, dropped out
then dropped out again

returning to capitalism
all was forgiven, but i was forever relegated to consumer status
what choice did i have / you always have a choice
mein innerer Krieg

i’ve returned to Christian faith to keep something alive
childhood maybe
the heart of it

if i had the courage, i might be Catholic
what with their astonishing saints, like Francis
whose life was more poetic than a poem
but St. Peter is still weeping over the bureaucracy at the Vatican
and the absence of sparrows

complete darkness relies on a sliver of light
total light requires a hint of dark
even fervent faith needs the whisper of religion
for ballast
and religion needs adjectives and the glint of doubt
to keep believers off the wet cement of dogma

lately: i’ve been going to a church
stepping out last Sunday
my playlist shuffled up Grateful Dead’s, Friend of the Devil
some still believe God is humourless

1.
There are times when life can culminate
in a quarter mile of country road: dark
before dawn, a heavy fog, and you, blind
to the breathing bodies galloping near,
suddenly, here, as you pedal your bike,
narrow tires on crushed gravel,
gliding downhill toward town, toward dawn,
your face wet with dew
and filled with the sound of slender hooves,
a herd of lithe ungulates in the mist,
and you, a child of God, a child of Gaia, adopted,
one of them, undiluted joy rushing right through you.

2.
Are we not human? Does our flesh not respond to a caress?
Do our souls not open in moments radiant, prismatic, sublime?
Are we not moved by mercy and kindness?
Does not Gaza choke and numb us?

How can I write of love, of surrender, of joy,
under the global shadow of people being torn open
by hate and missiles?

And while the genocide drags on, always worse;
the soul, despite that poem by Jack Gilbert,*
dwindles to a gnat.

They—the wardens of poetic scholarship—say Denise’s poetry
suffered lyrically when she began writing politically.
Seven books and three incarcerations later, and finally,
the end of the Vietnam war, How, asks Ms. Levertov,
does one evade total involvement in life?

3.
It has to do with love.
Somehow, this feeling, more than a feeling,
an outlook, a be-ing, that is utterly self-forgetting,
brazenly inclusive, roguishly accepting of people and place,
position and circumstance, recklessly open to scene and sound,
time and hope, courageously embracing loss and grief,
willingly patient of pain and death, this more-than-a-feeling,
this original love that invades your morning
like a sudden sun shooting through a stand of elm,
your ultimate surrender to life. Your no-way-out calling.

*A Brief for the Defense

Today I live less than a five-minute walk to an eight-lane freeway,
and when I leave the house, I imagine an ocean—waves
crashing close, then washing back over a broad gravel beach.
When I reach the pedestrian overpass, my deception is overcome
by a sea of single-occupant cars and trucks competing for time
and small forgettable victories. A loneliness of freeways.
A forest of polyvinyl cages, understory of rubber and alloy, all
bathed in burnt gas—venomous photosynthesis—blaring speed,
contrails of asphalt, bands of pavement like blind pythons
winding over the humiliated foothills.

When I walk the same distance in the other direction, I drop down
a wooded bank of buffaloberry and red-osier dogwood, trembling aspen
and balsam poplar, an occasional white spruce. Flash sightings of flickers.
Songs of chickadees. Everlasting magpies and scavenging crows.
Snagged on a prickly rose, a tuft of fur tells of a red-tailed hawk.
At the coulee’s nadir, a creek with miniature waterfalls, still falling,
still running in late August. A cure for souls.
The root-studded path leads to a hillside meadow of yarrow,
a tunic of arnica, wild blue aster, subalpine fleabane, and harebell.
Fireweed stands among inveterate goat’s beard, a neutrality of shrubby
cinquefoil, and a solemnity of honeysuckle and service berry.

Stopping at the creek, where things speak of solitude, I gaze
myself into a trance. When I emerge, as I must, I pray,
in my own distrait way, that—Earth may [yet] outwit
the huge stupidity of its humans.*

“Surely our task
was to have been
to love the earth,
to dress and keep it like Eden’s garden.”  -Denise Levertov

* line from Denise Levertov’s poem, Almost-Island

I

Was I failing you, boring you? So you grabbed your Boho coat,
your Trilby hat, your sheaf of song sheets, and stole away, down
some sibylline road.

Or, is this how old goes? Onset of senescence. Like piranha, advancing.
Nibbling, invading, the delicate shallows of meiosis; the discreet beaches
of mitosis, indiscriminate of bone or brain, sinew or cerebrum.

O, fear-and-wonder body—intricately and seamlessly knit, twilled,
latticed and lit with mind and imagination, soul if you will—
you have seen a caravan of years, and now, well into your “carnival
of losses,” your verses are hearses and your songs are all dirges.

II

Today, a friend arrived. He spoke the language of quiet lakes
reflecting ancient mountains. A dialect of mile-deep blues
and greys that yet glitter.

And I lifted my face toward the August foothills, where
white spruce and paper birch, where even wizened tamarack,
make no assumptions of season’s turns.

And the grey alder said: Do not let your heart be troubled.
              It is not your province
              to compose your epilogue. Go, wade
through your restive weariness, rise to your twilight mind,
perhaps to collide again with bursts of clarity, accidents of light.

Poetry may yet have news for you, news
you can’t get any other way.