We rest in the shade of oak trees
all summer. Yards from His room
on a green rolling lawn.
We feel the sun’s natural heat
tracing patterns on our bare shoulders.
We’ve come to expect Him,
each morning,
without fail.
Sighting—
the adept’s body alone—
our religion,
the whole and every part of it.
Orange marigolds,
a curled leaf
plucked from a tree in His own courtyard.
We cup these plain gifts
in our laps, echoing songs together for hours—
the lyrics, a rhythm bearing our own words
skyward, a waking in the air
to ferry away our fictions.
In a moment no one can predict,
everything quickens.
A man in dark sunglasses
twists open a parasol.
Three women
wrap cotton shawls on their shoulders,
hurrying to rest
on the exposed root of a tree.
Then the blasting conch,
a wind kicking up dried leaves.
He emerges
from the seclusion of His room,
almost naked,
granting visibility
to the loss of interior worlds.
Always,
He stands silent,
eyes roving
like a lighthouse beam
over our heads. Scanning plains
of history and fortune, then dropping
down to clasp our own eyes
in a regard that has no end,
happening even now.
We do nothing.
We give what we have:
our gaze.
All He ever asks of us.
The miracles
He performs,
not the bread and water kind.
He takes lives
and frees them.
The way fire
clears a forest of dead wood.
The sight of Him,
shocks,
elicits quiet gasps.
An alien form—
both man,
and not man.
Unearthly light
harbors in His pores.
A love
that devastates more than it uplifts
the heart.
To see Him,
to see
any of this—
you can't just open your eyes
like a child.
You must be rendered
the gift of sight
long before you've even heard of Him.
Your cataract of being
comes with birth.
Slow to heal,
dissolve.
And that is why—
for the future,
for our times here—
those long summer mornings
of heat,
patterned light,
song,
and disbelief
are chronicled.
Reels gathering dust
in archives. And like all proof,
parked
on a metal shelf.
Guarded by a clerk
who may insist: we have nothing here
more than a man
standing wordless on a lawn.
A man
with hands wrapped lightly on the head
of a pine cone staff.
Not waiting,
not patient.
Macerating His own
garden
before
the narrowed eyes.