Grace/Life/Poetics

Lesser Burden

Posted on by stephen t berg / 26 Comments

In your crowded heart there’s a list:
     cares, fears, hopes, loves,
     dissipations, disappointments,
     obsessions, resentments, regrets, resolves.
In your crowded heart there’s a potted plant
     you take little notice of until it’s brown past reviving;
     there’s a pear past eating, past its honeyed amber,
     entering its blackening. 
In your crowded heart there are things to fix
     which you can’t quite find the time for,
     or can’t quite find, or can’t quite remember;
     things scattered as though strewn through roadside trees:
         broken hair brushes, candy wrappers, crushed beer cans,
         flyers the wind has wrapped around trunks,
     and you, with your blue refuse bag and trash tongs,
     believing in time you’ll clean it all up.

Then one day in the dark of a late northern afternoon,
going home with groceries, pausing in the rain under a neon sign,
the glistening sidewalk stretching toward a hidden horizon,
     something hobbled in you breaks free,
     something lifts without reason or cause,
     something comes, brief but deep as an embrace,
     something as unearned as your birth,
     and you walk on toward that horizon,
     shouldering a lesser burden.

Life/Love/Nature

Nothing more real

Posted on by stephen t berg / 20 Comments

I said I will extract myself from this world,
for all its anger and deceit and daily carnage.

I said look at what’s happening:
worse than the prelude of the great atrocities.
Have we learned nothing from a past
that squats beneath a mere inch of dust,
easily stirred up under a parade of boots?

And when I rose to consider the business of checking out
the phone sounded:
It was my niece with her small daughter,
calling to wish me a glad birthday,
telling me about their day,
telling me about the first snow.

And through that small screen I saw the child race
to the picture window, hop, shimmy and twirl,
in the untamed way of all children. 

And through her
I heard the snow settle on the playground across the street,
smelled the loamy mix of wet grass and sodden leaves,
saw the edge of the river hill turn white
while a dense line of shrubs slipped under a thin quilt. 
And through the cover of cloud the invisible sun
suffused a gentle light on the crowns of trees,
trees that now seemed full of their own light,
their gowned limbs lifting as though given to praise.

And I said there is nothing more sacred than to be here,
grounded in the hope of a hallowed moment.
Nothing more real.

In Memoriam

Tree of Life

Posted on by stephen t berg / 10 Comments

Tree of Life
For Pittsburgh

I don’t know why the feeling of sufficiency is so hard to hang on to,
or perhaps I mean contentment, either way
the clematis vines drying on the fence at the close of another year make no bones,
the broad maple denuded by the season’s putsch is quietly resigned
to the winter wind,
but I should note that the wind is warm and under the rag-brown shadows
and the yielding yellow leaves the grass is greening,
and the seagulls, for all their common shit-fragging and screech-speech,
still glide over the bay like treble notes from angel’s throats,
making it possible to envision some kind of purpose
beyond the shifting borders of modernity,
beyond the death-dealing tribes of certainty,
making it possible to turn my mind off
and away from the hatred some humans have for others,
such hatred as to consume every image of light.

Last night in a dream or not a dream, I can’t be sure,
I saw the sun coming up over a valley,
and from across a river I heard eleven sons and daughters of Zion sing;
they sang a Psalm: the one about moths, rust, floods, fire, hate,
unable to consume their love.

Halloween/Smile

Do ghosts believe in the existence of humans? (And do they strive to evangelize the wispy-disbelievers?)

Posted on by stephen t berg / 8 Comments
Happy Halloween!

Assuredly, those who move among us unseen,
who slide blindly by mirrors
and see each other as wisps of smoke,
inadvertently riffling curtains,
accidentally startling small children,
flying above the feathery cities of Cassiopeia,
floating through ethereal libraries,
meeting each other in the charmed cafés of Polaris
for vacuous mugs of ectoplasm,
chatting, whusp whusp and chuff chuff…
hover, celestially, above it all.

But do they gather at the gauzy river
     every Sunday
to pray to the Great and Good Solid?

Do they debate and theorize the existence of Substance,
Its bio-attendants
and their diurnal ministrations?

Do they preach the fall of an Ancient Human?
that old Dissuader of the Specific and Particular,
that Seducer who makes war against the Viscous and Gluey
and the Righteous Position Mono-Solidism.

Is their commission the evangelization
    of the Transdimensional Whole?
convicting all the lost incorporealists,
condemning misty-disbelievers,
the a-somatics, the a-anthropists;
warning of the consummation of Substance,
caroling with anticipation the time of Emanation,
which is preceded by a rapturous Manifestation
and the tribulated Occlusion,
ushering in the great day of Materialization.

The great and terrible day of Solidity,
when all will be Matter.