You fill my life with irises and callas, daylilies and my own chrysanthemums that flourish in the brutal heat of Dallas because you love—the greenest of all thumbs.
And I have taken root within our garden far deeper than I guessed such things could grow. New rootthreads sprout and in the dark earth harden; now they withstand your well-loved winter snow.
You grow here, too, beside me through the summer. We drop our leaves and wither in the heat until September brings the sound of thunder, and let the wind and rain and hailstones beat.
When January comes, how will it find us? Asleep and waiting for the end of gloom, our roots entangled so they join and bind us. When summer comes again, love, we will bloom.
I can’t find a good photo online, but if you’re in north Texas, you’ve seen along empty stretches of highway whole trees enveloped in wild grapevines. These are mustang grapes.
As leafy vines are swallowing live oaks, devouring miles along the interstate, and mustang grape swarms up the tree and chokes the branches, bears a bitter weight: inedible wild grape that cannot sate but only mocks the hunger it provokes,
so I am overtaken by this vine of thought, and bound within the twisting shoot that sprang up out of nothing just to twine about my being, crown to trunk to root, ‘til I am glutted on its sourest fruit and starving for the taste of bread and wine.
These grapes are bitter as the oak tree gall, dark as the shadows hiding them from view, but even so are harvested in fall and sugar’s added—buckets full—to brew sweet wine from sorrow. Thus we follow you: O sweet-as-honey Lord, redeem it all.
I am a creature of the silver pennies: I see one on the ground and pick it up, collecting them by ones and two and manys, then with these tarnished hands I take your cup.
And you, who sent the wine around the table, you know my measure: Pockets like the deeps for all these coins, well-lined with silk and sable to hold my treasure as I play for keeps.
I tell myself I’ll quit, but when I find them the penny’s in my hand before I know. I say I’ll forge a silver chain to bind them— stronger than gold—and break it even so.
By now I am a richer man than Judas who had a measly thirty for his kiss. Was it for this you sought us and pursued us, and poured your blood out, Lord? Was it for this?
II.
Give me the courage to begin again this minute, though the sixty last have failed and sixty before that. This day has been a failure, Lord, since first the morning sailed into the sky, though no storm wind has galed to wreck its course: I stove the day’s hull in.
I cannot doubt the mercy you extend but only my intention to accept. Sincerity some of these sins should end— then am I insincere, or just inept? I cannot count the hours that I have wept over these thefts, and yet their wage I spend.
These silver pennies I have held so dear have bought me treasures I can’t bear to lose, but even they cannot allay my fear that someday I must reckon up my dues. My will is weak, but still I want to choose to draw more near to you, and yet more near.
III.
I bring you what I have, tithe to your name, my fatted calf, my lamb and turtledove. I bring them all and lay them in the flame: They will suffice for one who cannot love.
Where I should give my heart, a widow’s mite. It is—believe me, Lord—my livelihood. Accept its gleaming, not as love so bright, and all the silver pennies I’ve accrued.
I pay this toll to open mercy’s doors. Is it enough? No. Only your own coin can manage that. Then you must lend me yours: Your love unto my offering must join.
And then my empty hands will overflow and precious coins upon the altar spill. My mites afire with love of yours will glow: Behold, O God, I come to do your will.
Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. Even all the hairs of your head are counted. So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. —Matthew 10:26-33
We feel it in our marrow, this sadness in us curled: that the falling of a sparrow is the breaking of the world.
And oh! How many sparrows! How many broken wings! How many slings and arrows! How many serpent stings!
Yet not a one escapes you or falls beyond your sight. How precious in your tables, our dropping into night!
For you, O God, are jealous and hoard each sparrow’s breath: You do not let your treasures unseen go down to death,
and when our flying ceases, and when we fall to earth, the weight of death increases that waits for our new birth.
But now that weight you carry, your fingers gently curled around the fallen sparrow, around the broken world.
Much later he would think about this day, the dreadful silence broken by their grunts as, shoulder to the heavy stone, they’d sway, rock back and forth again, ‘til all at once that gag upon the grave mouth rolled away and left behind a gasp at all these stunts. Then from within, one tooth in all that gape, came Lazarus bone-white in linen drape.
He’d helped unwind the wrappings and set free the body from the binding of its shroud. If kings have longed to see what now we see, he’d thought, then we are greater than the proud, yet dare not raise our eyes. How can it be? His friend was strange to him in all that crowd. What cannot happen happens at his word— how can I hear what prophets never heard?
Yet so he had, and words had changed the world, had filled it with a living, golden light, and now the one who’d spoken it lay curled in linen, too, sent down to endless night. But still a golden sunrise had unfurled, and somehow still the world was morning bright though he had wrapped his friend in cerement span— then he remembered Lazarus and ran.
The calla blooms like carven stone, carrara opening to the sun. No mason’s work has ever shown the grace of blossoms here begun,
yet every lily’s winter’s prey and every work our hands have made will have its night as well as day, and someday even stone will fade.
We will be lost, and memory’s doom is but to vanish as the dew, yet we have seen the lily bloom and witnessed what our forebears knew:
Though all of this will be forgot when we are all long-since dislimned, yet for a moment we were caught in lily’s light before it dimmed.
Calla By Christian Rohlfs – scan from German watercolors, drawings and prints [1905-1955]. A midcentury review, with loans from German museums and galleries and from the collection Dr. H. Gurlitt. American Federation of Arts, New York 1956, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29874669
As cabbage whites upon the calla light and tremble on the rim of purest white unmatched by anything but their delight and white in white is lost to my poor sight,
so may we on the lily of the Lord alight, the rim from which all mercy poured, and know ourselves with him in such accord that we are one at last with our adored.
Close wing position of Talbotia naganum (Moore, 1884) – Plain Cabbage White This photograph was clicked from Namdapha National Park, Arunachal Pradesh By Ankit0908 – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=141854847
Then the LORD called to him and said, “Thus shall you say to the house of Jacob; tell the Israelites: You have seen for yourselves how I treated the Egyptians and how I bore you up on eagle wings and brought you here to myself. Therefore, if you hearken to my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my special possession, dearer to me than all other people, though all the earth is mine.” —Exodus 19:2-6a
O you who open prison doors and crumble fortress walls with sudden, terrifying force, it is your voice that calls.
You shatter shackles, break the chains, and set the captives free to walk the world and know its pains— so you have done to me.
You brought me to a pleasant land; you bid me take my ease and walk without your guiding hand: O God, how can that please?
You bid me walk in righteous paths and tell me what they are, but all rewards and all your wraths are distant as a star.
Then I must take it on myself to choose where I would go: This is your freedom, nothing else, and terrible to know.
And when I fall, as oft I do, and when I choose the wrong and wander far away from you, the homeward way is long.
But you’ll not keep me at your side nor bind my wand’ring heart: Not so the Bridegroom binds his Bride, though far she dwells apart
and builds a prison once again where she can rest secure. You break the walls I build, and then you set me free once more.
Christ delighted in flowers. –Bernard of Clairvaux, “On Loving God”
And God, eternal love from age to age, said, “I will love what cannot last, what is not of my being but longs for it. Their longing I assuage, as to myself I bring the ones who fall to storm wind’s blast and time,” and made the lily and the sage.
They could not help but blossom in his love and fade as quickly as they bloomed to vanish from the earth, yet when their maker left his seat above he chose the lily’s birth: to bud, unfold, and then be doomed with all the flowers he’d had the making of.
For by their nature they could not remain— these somethings made from nothing fall, returning to the dust and leaving nothing, not even a stain, an ash, a fleck of rust— yet when they live, he lives in all, and when they die he knows their dying pain.
But he who made the seasons made the spring; who made the stars made all the hours and each new-mercied day, and though we drop like petals withering he knows our swift decay. Christ so delighted in the flowers he fades with us, although he is our king.
And so with him we fall and we return. We languish with a passing breath, as wind in autumn sighs, yet he is curled within, a sleeping fern and spring that never dies, that we may blossom after death delighting in him, too, for whom we yearn.
Now see what she has given up for love, for sorrow of her love, and for the hope that she may find him yet, may climb above the realm of tears so limitless in scope and find the palace where her Cupid dwells, who for his love has braved the deepest hells:
the eyes that looked forbidden on his wings, the hands that stroked his feathers in the dark. She bids farewell to all these lesser things that led her on to burn him with the spark she never should have kindled—but once seen, his visage drew her longing straight and keen.
So she has followed Cupid in his flight as far as mortal flesh on earth can go and onward still into the deepest night at Venus’ hest, beyond what mortals know. All pride stripped back, she journeys down to death, no memory but of his honeyed breath.
Beneath her tongue two coins to cross the Styx, with secret wisdom swirling in her mind, the guardian of the underworld she tricks and begs the queen of death to be so kind. Kinder than Venus, Prosperpina gives to Psyche what she asks—and Psyche lives.
Herself forgotten, thoughts on him alone, she flees the pain that burns and then benumbs ‘til shame is gone with all she’s ever known. Emerging from the underworld, she comes; her beauty lost, she leaves the shadowed lands, diviner beauty hidden in her hands.
And Cupid waking, healed of his long pain, bestirs himself to seek as she did him, desires to see his Psyche once again and by his touch restore her, life and limb. He who for love betrothed him to her soul will take her to the skies and make her whole.
This summer day an image of your bounty; this storm that’s rolling in your wrath, of course— your mercy, too: We could not live without it. Yes, all the things we see are metaphors
for you, and we see dimly in a mirror. I look, and those I know all seem to me trees walking, ‘til you make my vision clearer. When will you touch my eyes and let me see?
I walk a world of shadows, nothing real. Content with them, I ask you, “What is truth?” You do not answer, only set a meal and give your flesh to me, my tongue and tooth.
And all the bread I’ve tasted was an image, just ink and paint and paper, dry as ash. And all the wine I’ve drunk was but to mimic the soul that sips a flood where you were gashed.
But when I eat the meal you set before me I feel the life that rises from the dead. The seed that fell and rose reveals your glory: You offer me my first real taste of bread.
Last Supper, drawing, Philips Koninck, late 1650s. Pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash, over traces of red chalk, heightened with white gouache, with framing line in pen and brown ink. Laid down. – This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60888837
Kate Bluett 