Cuthbert's Bones
As the light comes up, stage right is dark, though one can see
four figures seated around a campfire. Stage left is Cuthbert’s
coffin, and one can see a large slab, raised and tilted so one can read
the single word “Cuthbert” carved into it. As lights dim on
the tomb, they come up on the four seated figures variously
dressed in apparel from the 9th century. These are four brothers:
Farfox, Harbrand, Borogrove, and Clan. They are escorting the bones of
Bishop Cuthbert, who was buried on the island of Lindesfarne, off the
northeast coast of England, in 687. When the Danes invaded in 875, the
monks, including Farfox, fled with the corpse, to protect it from
pillage. Many years later, in 1104, the bones were placed Durham
Cathedral. During their journey, Farfox's brothers have joined
him, and the following dialogue takes place one night around a
campfire. Cuthbert speaks from his coffin. The brothers rise and pace,
sit and stand. Various pieces of stage business may be interpolated.
Cuthbert:
Farfox, Harbrand, Borograve, and Clan.
With these four I probe the mind of man
That such a storm should bring good news
And fracture all the lesser, partial views.
Farfox:
We have lived apart too long, my brothers.
My horses hooves are splayed and split, and I
Am tired. My body does not heal itself.
My butt’s a mass of sores that will not heal.
Women? Last week, I couldn’t get it up.
That’s how bad it’s been.
Harbrand:
All morning I stared into my books.
Every quarter hour they told me less.
By ten, they hit the zero point
And began to drain what I already knew.
By noon I knew nothing at all
And sat at my desk knowledge-naked,
quivering like a peeled egg. I saw
With utter clarity the utter
emptiness of all I knew
and all I had acquired. I cast
Myself down into a solemn melancholy
And sat with an ache in my heart
for the accumulated sins of the world
And my own paltry musings
Which I saw had come and would come to nothing.
And so I resolved upon silence
Resolved to go about the world
Relieving what suffering I could
And keeping a cheerful countenance
Until the time came for me to die.
Farfox:
My cell’s window formed a skin. It was pebbled
Like a boar’s hide and thickly patterned
with small jagged shapes, as if
Translucent leaves had fallen on the panes
And were rotting at uneven rates.
I find the fire and nurture it until
I have enough to melt the ice to make
my tea. The disk of ice grows less and less
And then floats free. Each bubble trapped
Inside the ice is liberated one
by one, bobs up on a short tether, bursts
To mix last night’s air with what I breathe
today. I thus inhale the past, as I
Do too, when I lug my aching joints
To the table I have built within my cell
And break my skull against those sullen
Marks until they ignite and blaze again
With the heat that lay within them all
I scrape away the blackened coals
Those frozen years.
I trundle through the fallen snow to take
My daily shit. Smoke rose from turds
And frosted the hair on my thighs. My ass
No doubt, is white, a spectacle I almost
Wish that I should see. Later, when I
Go outside to pee, I piss new holes
Into the snow each time to make a face.
Eyes, nose, crooked teeth--
My body-heated waste drills holes right through
The crusted snow to touch the frozen roots
Of next year’s spring. Beneath those yellow lids,
Black eyes look up at me to say
I laugh at your poor pale poisoned piss.
Come March wind, I’ll blaze to green again.
You cannot kill what is not meant to die.
Harbrand:
Books, I tell you, Farfox, such things they must be
Black marks painted on to sheets of skin
Bound in leather, glued to boards,
Stacked in cool rooms with monks to watch
them, day and night. Is that were brothers come to do
What they call read. I would like to learn
But first I must learn Latin, such click-clack
Tongue. Thought comes measured out in Latin
By the spoon, or legions tramping out
Their stolid miles, not like Celtic, twisting
In the teeth, or our own
Saxon guttering: a candle in the rain.
But O such things await one in those books--
Cuthbert:
Farfox hears the voice of distant realms.
He spits a curse at greasy, land-locked dreams.
“The time of kings is gone clean out of spite,
The reign of clan is now about to start.
The memory of a lonely desolate inn
Is something less than heaven’s splendid gain.”
Unknown, he moved in silence through the land.
Leaves knew he was there, and grass, and rocks.
The people did not know. He came, he went,
Resting by day and traveling at night,
Alone except for birds and fox and deer.
Farfox scans the horizon, seeing there
a wrist of dust that hung above the ground
almost a tattered shred of gloom
torn loose from lowering clouds that threatened rain.
Pursued, pursued, nor any chance to rest.
Day on dreary day, a little water
boiled for some tea, a little bread,
an hour or two of fitful rest,
sleep held at bay by shadows
of the next day’s driven flight,
The next task prodding underneath the ribs,
Work done and redone in the restless mind
and still undone when he gets up at last
His hobbled horse, warm in the predawn cold
leaps awkwardly away, yet trembles, touched.
Farfox:
Two books there are in a darker language yet
Only Brother Towin touches them
For only he can read that language.
Tonwin learned from Luke, who perished when
The Danes burned Lindesfarne. Luke lay upon
the books to keep them whole. Tonwin found his
gashed and blackened corpse and had to pry
his arms apart to take the books and flee
across the heath, hiding in the hedges, traveling
by night between the raging fires lit
by the heathen Danes who knew not what they did.
Cuthbert:
Alarm, alarm, the world is closing in.
The heralds of disaster cry for sin.
The music of the ear becomes a din.
The steel of resolution melts to tin.
Farfox:
Resources diminished, but what does it mean?
Desert’s dryness where water has seen.
Gathering gloom in a valley of tears.
Alliance with bleakness and ragged fears.
What is that calling soft and insistent?
Why am I hiding, corrupt and resistant?
Give me some order, give me some hope.
Alliance with light on a slippery slope.
Cuthbert:
Harbrand’s gone on a dark quest
Out where the wolves prowl, he’s built
A little hut. And there he sits
He hardly eats.
He has a boy who fetches
Food and water once a week.
He makes dark marks on sheets of bark
He peels from the white birch.
He calls it writing
Evidently it requires great silence.
Harbrand:
Here in this sacred place where nothing else
But words can come, in a world so quiet,
The scratching of pen sounds like thunder,
The poem shapes itself inside your chest.
Its steady beat becomes your beating heart.
Words become your blood and flow along
Your veins, and all you know pours in on
All you see. You can, you can, suffuse
Your mind with art till all you see
And hear and touch is tipped with fire.
All you know’s ablaze with dark desire.
Farfox:
Across the frozen wastes I went, brothers.
I crossed the mountains all alone,
Northern villages, lying loose in the sun.
At Ripon, I stumbled, weary, to an inn.
The mattress swarmed with vermin, but I laughed.
Downstairs, I drank and talked. The mead
Is bitter, like the salt of the Irish Sea.
Borograve told me what they said. He know the Celtic
Tongue well.
Harbrand:
Silence and time, brothers, these are the things.
When you can find them, then your heart sings.
Down into darkness, down deeper still
Far beyond knowledge and far beyond will.
Nothing of reason and little of thought.
Nothing you wanted there, and nothing you bought.
Then comes the music and maybe some words.
Nothing like business and nothing like birds.
you can’t call it mystery, and you can’t call it form.
Nothing of coldness and nothing of warm.
Angels surround me, come at my call
Give when they’re certain I’ve given my all.
Alone in my denseness, alive in the air,
Rejoicing in tenseness, a fox in his lair.
Farfox:
At the bottom of night is a wounded beast
Who summons me to make this feast.
Is this mouth I meet in the pit of my soul
My dearest comrade or bitterest foe?
He drives me far from the haunts of men,
But the smell of truth hangs thick in his den.
I slink through the shades of amber-stained light,
And friends draw back in quiet fright.
In the middle of death, my mind lies curled
Forgotten by love, unknown to the world.
I taste with his teeth and he gives me a bone
With the shape of pain and the heft of a stone
Then I climb back up to a morning sky
A raven’s laugh and a woman’s cry.
Clan
Power lies in giving something up.
Forgive the lies that run from every cup.
Wade boldly in and crucify yourself.
Drink every poison found upon the shelf.
Your fading powers occupy your mind,
But all your work remains for you to find.
Harbrand
At least once a day, it happens.
O hammerblow from the past
Or something from the present gathers itself
Into a knot and shakes itself in our face,
Something says to you this matters, or did.
Something reveals its muse to you.
Something sings.
And later in the quiet dawn, if you listen,
You can summon that music forth again,
And it will guide the instrument of your vision
And give to common words an uncommon shape
Borograve:
Rejoice that you have tasted truth at last
Thou mockery of good, didst thou not know
Thy feet were clay, thy breath the prime of dung
Thy teeth the ratted ends of gnawed-on bones
Thy ears mere convoluted mud
Thy genitals infection’s kingdom
That thou are allowed to live is miracle.
Farfox:
Some great task has been appointed. I have been summoned, not saying
why. Obscure messages are left behind rocks. I am asked to do
obscure things: place two crossed sticks underneath an oak
tree, travel to a small town and eat a meal, leaving a large tip in
foreign coins. I do them: I never know whether the enterprises
succeed. I hope so, but I only know I have done my part. Perhaps
at some point I’m offered a larger vision, a chance to move up in
the hierarchy. I try it and am made profoundly anxious. I
ask for permission to return to my former state.
Harbrand:
A blood-red moon, chances in the dark
failure taken as resolve.
Released from the burden of thought,
the mind can ride the wind of rhyme
and create the rhythms by which
the present world dances.
Clan:
Waves smash the rocks and wear them down.
Rocks are not too proud to wear away
Under such rigor.
Farfox:
Vulnerable to every mother’s son,
Everywhere the target of their fun,
Shunned by the rich, and by the proud ignored,
Taunted by the crowd until they’re bored.
Reviled by all? I’ll tell you what to do.
You revel in the dung they cast on you.
Cuthbert:
The night sky flashes, breaks apart
Along such ragged lines
We only see in the violent dark
That heaven’s of various kinds.
The sky has been pieced together
From whatever was lying around
The pieces strain at their tether
And would break at the thunder’s sound
The thunder is only a warning
That the world aches to split
That our knowledge will exit storming
When everything is lit.
Farfox:
Call me what you will brothers,
My name is given in heaven.
But as you eat the bread, my king,
Think upon its leaven.
(What is this thing that would be born,
Half of ivory, half of horn?
It crawls about beneath my skin
It looks like truth, and feels like sin)
Harbrand:
I can see blood beating in the wrist
But cannot know what broken steps I missed.
Down deeper down inside the pain,
Strike deep enough to find a voice that’s sane
To guide me through this land without a map
And bring me safely to my lover’s lap.
As long as I can feel the pain, I live.
We h ear that word again but cannot give
More credence to it than to the merest bird
Life is what God gave, or so I’ve heard.
Clan:
Remember the basics: What’s important is not your success or failure at
any particular project. What is important is the inside of the
project--the quality of life you exhibit in carrying it out. Virtue.
Don’t ask yourself, Did I succeed in designing a new marketing
strategy? Were sales up? Ask yourself, Did I remain cheerful,
resilient, attentive, patient? Did I lose my temper? Did I snap
at anyone? Did I make anyone feel small, unnecessarily? Did I
even feel anger or despair? Did I lose faith in the essential
goodness of those I dealt with? Did I slip in my determination to
treat the shortcomings of others as the anomaly, the accident,
and their decent motives as the true person, the substance?
Borograve:
Stand to one side and hold your tongue
You pestilential monk.
These shrines are a blight upon the land
And you are but a skunk.
Hargrave:
Four men lay tossed like old dolls,
eyes dull and angry by turns.
“Where do you...Do they let you out..”
“No, none of that for us.
One corner of the cell we save for that.
Then the guards come and gather up the
soiled straw and haul it away.”
Farfox:
Perhaps some good may come of this:
As I stalk the floor in the small hours,
I adjust my breathing to my steps
Four out, turn and then four in.
Of such measured steps, we make a life,
Breathing in and out around our pain,
Concentrated on the stuff that lives
Arranging it in complicated shapes
Until its pattern overwhelms the pain,
Squeezes it into the cracks between the life
Where it lurks and sulks in the dark,
Biding its time until an hour of weakness
When it roars forth to call us to despair
And back to lonely battles in the dark
Four out, and turn and then four in again.
Harbrand:
We walk in the loosening sand
The anger that flows in my bloodstream,
The rage that devours my heart,
Is nothing compared to the river
That divides the mind from its art.
As quick as I go into hiding,
Demons find me and take hold of my soul
What the angels are doing won’t answer
Or make my right hand whole
Must I lie down in darkness forever
Driven and cold and alone?
With only the hum of the street lamp
A distant and dangerous tone?
Such noises come often at midnight.
They disturb me and won’t go away--
An itch that refuses to answer,
The scratch that keeps it at bay.
Voices of silence consume us
We push to the edge of too much
We cannot deliver the package
From out of the world’s clutch.
If I listen too close to the music
That tells me to call it my friend,
Then who will befriend me at sunrise,
When the music comes to an end?
The darkness, the darkness will save us,
The quiet, the quiet at dawn,
A pen moving over the paper
Spirit and Word coming on.
At last, at last comes salvation
An emerging sense of the self.
It batters its way to the surface,
that wily illusive old elf--
Summoned by rhythms and meters
He stifles his burgeoning pride
He releases his grip on my heartstrings,
He comes to stand by my side.
Clan:
There are two distinct ways of life one based on confidence, and
a shrewd assessment of the world, a calm determination of
what needs to be done to succeed and a systematic plan to do it, so
that success is not an accident but the working out of complex and
finite procedures; the other/ based on humility, on doing as well as we
can the simple tasks we find set before us, so that success, if
it comes, is simply an accidental intersection of the world’s needs
with where we are in the world.
Borograve:
Gather round, ye brothers,
To tell the gods good-bye
If the gods are gone forever
Yet we should not cry.
a thousand lie before us
Broken at our feet
Yet no one dares to think
Of anguish or defeat
Cuthbert:
Fire burned low as they drifted off to sleep.
When they awoke, they'd find the fire cold.
Farfox:
The great black cloud of angry gloom
that seals me tight inside its iron tomb
And now the clouds descend and all grows dark
The furies come again to make their mark.
Such black implacable anger seizes me
That we would gladly crush the world between
Our fingers like a loathsome bug and laugh
to hear its blood go gurgling down some
cosmic drain, the screams of pain sweet music
in our ears.
Harbrand:
I have given up
And flung the cup
Away from me
But no matter how
I scrape and bow,
The pen keeps scratching
The rhymes keep hatching
Though the mind is numb
And the meaning dumb,
I stumble on
To the dew filled dawn
To blend my words
With the sound of birds
That one far hence
Might find their sense
And think one kind thought
For a man who ought
To have done better
Than write this letter.
Clan:
Though you won’t believe it can be true,
Density will tell us what to do:
Sink like a stone into the earth.
Never was pain without some birth.
drink whatever the black witch brews
Otherness is all the news.”
Harbrand:
Declare the running rivers dry,
Behold the clouds of tin.
Rain holds back, we hear its cry,
A token of our sin
Proclaim the end of timebound man
Renew the slant of time
Proclaim a broken, fragile plan,
Proclaim the rule of rhyme
The masks of sanity arouse God’s ire
He strikes and not in vain.
We dare not raise our sights much higher
Lest we should cease from pain.
Below the threshold of this hour
A stream runs deep and clear
Shadows of a broken tower
Stand guard against our fear.
Cuthbert:
Borograve stood breathing, there he stood.
His hair has sweat itself to disks and clung
like broken bird’s nests, plastered to his head.
He loosened his ganach to let the cold
air dry the sweat upon his chest.
High on a cliff beside the frozen lake
November cold had filmed the lake with ice.
Ducks, disconsolate, walked in circles...
Farfox:
This hunger for darkness that gnaws at my bones
This restless outreaching, this space between stones
Where is it leading and what does it say.
Why is it calling as insistent as clay.
Oh give me some answers, some direction some sign
Send me down deep in that marvelous mine.
Let me know pressure, let me know space,
Most of all let me, O let me know Grace.
I have tried to give up dreaming,
But the dreams come when they will.
I have tried to earn a living
And bade my heart be still.
Everything about me
Is ill-fit and out of joint
When other see the implication,
I barely get the point.
I have yearning but no power,
Hunger without a mouth.
Drawn by what I cannot grasp,
Drowning, feeling drought.
I must embrace my failure;
I cannot change my ways.
I must stumble on in riches
All my anxious loving days.
Harbrand:
I want to itch but cannot scratch.
Do chickens cry before they hatch?
Such odd compelling destiny
Has come at dawn to trouble me
Some music pounds inside my head
Half alive, but hardly dead
Beyond the sun, beyond all time
Out of the ooze and covered with slime
Restless rhythms have come to call
I know some words, but can’t know all
Rejecting sense they seek some form
They live and die a death by storm
Keats and Shelley and Byron and Blake
These have given and now they take
I must give them what they want
Their voice is keen, their eyes are gaunt
They call me a dreamless sleep
And give me promises to keep.
Clan:
I will teach you hungers you didn’t not know
You had, and when you feel the hunger, then
I will tell you no food exists on earth
To slake that gnawing pain you feel inside.
You will roam a sad and terrible world
And every step you take your legs will break,
healing as you lift your foot to place it down,
to be broken yet again. Fresh
pain, fresh healing, every step.
Common speech and life will be withdrawn,you hope, so something better
can be born,
But all that’s born is just more bitter dung
so you have lost one world and not gained one
redeeming lovely sacred nourished thing.
And all your work results in this, just this:
The strength to go on with this feat
Defeated, and gathering strength from each defeat.
Borograve:
O do not end the maiden’s song
Once heard across the dew
But ease away the deep heart’s wrong
And leave me damp and new.
I would not linger here forever
I would not hold back long
I will not cease, I will not ever,
Having heard this song.
Farfox:
I can see blood beating in the wrist
But cannot know what broken steps I missed.
Down deeper down inside the pain,
Strike deep enough to find a voice that’s sane
To guide me through this land without a map
And bring me safely to my lover’s lap.
As long as I can feel the pain, I live.
We hear that word again but cannot give
More credence to it that to the merest bird
Life is what God gave, or so I’ve heard.
If this is news of some mistake,
Some mistook goal, some image of myself,
Beyond what modest powers are mine to claim
Then I renounce those claims at once forever
Let me labor in some obscure post alone,
But give me back my voice, restore to me
The common realm--birdsong, friendship, love
Let one thought however small, course
Freely through my brain, untinged by rank
Self-consciousness that fogs my mind and sets
My nerves on fire, that startles those I love
And drives them from me, scared, enraged and cold.
But if I have been given some dim task,
Some work to do, which when I refuse it,
Brings me to my knees, shuts out the world
Creates chaos all around until,
Sinking down into my pain, I touch some stone
And anchor there and sway, why then I pray
Tell me what it is. Give me direction
Vision, hope. Keep me at my daily task
And that is all. Is it too much to ask.
Harbrand:
Glimmering odd-shaped ponds lie about
Scattered on the land like bent dimes.
Melting snow leaves dust behind,
Pressing down the matted grass
Unevenly like shocks of grain
Which do not bend to let the wind pass.
The landscape sings itself into a song.
The world itself becomes Iambic fire.
This we know is how we ought to live--
Hearing distant music played on present
Instruments, converting landscape into
Symphony so fast that God himself
Can scarcely give us notes fast.
Clan:
Set no goals, for goals are just a crutch.
Your worries, plans, and all you have to do,
Throw all into the pot and make a stew.
The future casts its shadow back on you.
Stand in that shade to know what’s false and true.
Your worth’s controlled by what is yet to come.
Reach through events to what they yet may be.
Their futureness is what will set them free.
Count syllables and never look aside.
Marry form. Become its loving bride.
Borograve:
Tintinnabulation
Cacophony of horns
Misguided restitution
Feeds the flame of thorns
Farfox:
Must beauty hide beneath the stone
Must fair things lie so near the bone?
Must ugliness conceal?
Does true faith heal?
When we pluck a golden rose
Must we suppose
Its beauty is a thing unique
with meanings that we know will leak
Away and leave us colder, colder still
Alone upon a windy hill?
Evil comes oozing out of the earth
Strangling all the forces of birth.
Who has unloosed them? Why do they come?
I cannot answer. They numb, they numb.
They come when I answer the world’s call.
Over the world they throw a pall
One then another of the world’s toys
Dies in my hand without a noise
Till I stand empty and mute and old,
Trembling in silence, nothing but cold,
Cut off from whatever gives strength to my arm
Unable to answer the cries of alarm
That sound in the distance like cries of a child
Feeding, or eating, all this is wild.
Harbrand:
Reality is no good,
It’s not a thing I choose to recognize.
Unfiltered its messages are chaos
But the windows of tradition frame
Them round, and framed they
tell a story of something less than loss
And more of what our hearts can barely name
Clan:
Deeper, ever deeper into night’s dark time,
Protect me, protect me with thy rhyme.
Live long enough, the world will come to you,
But will you want it , with its leaden hue?
Cuthbert:
Horseshoes and buttons and wheat,
But I will tell you what matters.
Silence matters and the presence of God
I can teach you how to breathe,
How to breathe in that presence
Till your limbs go slack
And you sink like an old stone
warm, into the cold clay
But you must come up higher,
Out of these fetid valleys,
Up into the Pennines
Up where the air is sharp
And the pine and hemlock needles sharp
Hargrave:
When I peer into the dark and full abyss
of possibility and see that lake
crammed full of rich connection, my heart would kiss
the things I see, but cannot reach and take.
Narrator:
Harbrand walks on broken bloody feet,
Finishing a long and sad retreat.
Beside him trots the ragged dogs of Kor,
Each one a vast and superating sore.
Their feet leave blood tracks upon the dust,
Because man wills it, not because they must.
They wore their nails to nothing, then dug on,
Scratching at the rock which seals the tomb,
Sniffing at the stale acidic doom.
Harbrand drove them on, he can’t say why.
“You must dig on,” he said, “or I must die.”
Farfox:
Be in me now, St. Benedict
Enlighten my days with your strict
Negations of my reluctant
Energies, going always a-slant,
Diverting themselves into silly
Insular concerns that willy-nilly
Come to nothing, all the while
Towers collapse with a quiet smile.
Clan:
Man cannot live I tell you
all hollowed out inside
Emptiness must be addressed
once the dream has died
Harbrand:
I listen to a music far more dense.
I hear it in the space between the years.
It drives away the plain sustaining sense,
and that clogs my slowly thickening ears.
Clan:
Whatever can save you, the little that’s known
Lies a lot closer to skin than bone,
Lies on the other side of the waste,
Compounded of texture and rhythm and taste.
All of your struggle to avoid the abyss
Has just brought you closer, has caused you to miss
The thing that would heal you, the truth you would know,
The flower that blooms beneath the snow.
Not enough silence, not enough dark
Not enough pain to make a mark
Too much of the world with its endless joys.
Not enough common and simple joys.
Borograve:
“The cave of wind’s become a refuge too.
Release the birds and give them freedom’s due.”
A thousand drums beat softly in the air.
The wind blew round our melancholy lair
Birds flew. Wing thudded hard on wing.
We listened hard. We could not hear them sing.
Farfox:
The depths of wilderness
Enchant my mind
Battered children
These
I pick
Neglect, abuse
A desperate father
A child weeps
That wanted
Only to please
And mothers
To pull this pain into their withered arms.
Harbrand:
Sentiment is very close
Shield
Language
When it lunges toward the realms of glory.
Clan:
to flee
To love
To embrace the dubious,
To reject the sure
Stark desperation
Sighs in the dark
Blind restoration
Dead on the mark
The edges of reality cut my flesh
Men flee in terror. It’s your vast desire
Such multi-leveled complicatedness
Such consuming metaphysic fire
Gives us more when what we want is less
Borogrove:
That is the symbol you always sought,
The salvation I promised, that your ancestors bought
With it, come quickly, come over the bridge,
Come out of the valley, come up on the ridge.
Let the wind dry the swat of your brow.
Hitch up your horses to that rusted plow.
Take to the field, turn over the sod.
Know that the earth can tell you of God.
Dig deeper down, dig deeper still.
What have you lost that you cannot kill?
That anguish inside you that your can't get out?
Why won't you listen, why must I shout?
Why must you linger by Hankinson's road
Why won't you pick up your burden, your load
Cuthbert:
Farfox rattles in his den.
Wind howls in ceaseless space.
Rattle now the cage of man.
Arouse the sleeping race.
Who steps alone into that cave,
Bids distance call his name,
Becomes a willing broken slave,
Renounces every claim.
Harbrand:
Will nothing come to me without the aid
of rhyme and line and stress? Is there no way
I can see the world straight? Why must
I stand mute before a universe
Of shapes and shades and sounds? Will nothing
Give itself to me words but I must
Chisel out significance with black marks
Upon the page? Will not two things
Connect in any place except upon a page?
I have become a prisoner of my craft
And beg release in this, a living draft.
Clan:
You do not feel your soul slip away.
The instant you lose hold of it,
You are doing something else--
Talking on the telephone or writing a letter
Crossing something off your list,
But later that day, you feel it:
A dampness at the ends of your bones
The stiffening of your breath
As if the air were resisting your lungs,
A feeling of anger and sadness equally mixed,
As if you wanted to lash out and weep
All at once, The world is suddenly unavailable, thick with dust
and ashes
And you are persona non grata to the universe
An excrescence, a thing unclean,
Unspeakable dung, gravel in the
hub of the wheel.
Cuthbert:
And is there no way out?
Clan:
The way out is always through silence
Always the renunciation.
Always the turning inward
Rejecting the immediate outer
In favor of the immediate inner.
Borograve:
The landscape sings itself into a song.
The world itself becomes a limbic fire.
This we know is how we ought to live--
Hearing distant music played on present
Instruments, converting landscape into
Symphony so fast that God himself
Can scarcely give us notes enough to last.
Farfox:
Take me away to where dead silence reigns
Eternally, where blessed blackness deigns
Revenge and those who feel, feel only pains.
Great God, is there some meaning in this hurt?
Can any lesson come from this, I blurt?
I will not seek relief from my own hand,
Although my spirit’s staked on the burning sand.
Though all around me crumble into dust
Though all be stripped away, save trust.
Though I don’t wish it, this is where I dwell
Knowing all I need and want to know of hell.
Harbrand
We do not make our poems, you fool
They are torn from us, like bleeding parcels.
You women know the ways it’s done.
A shape is struck within us,
Our flesh is hollowed in an agony of form
We are flung about the room, empty, not ourselves.
Clan:
Part of the reason you are what you are,
Restless as grasses and bright as a star
Lies in your silly insatiable whim
(Measured in units intolerably grim)
To insist that the world must be set right,
To polish everything handsome and bright.
But you know in your heart that you simply can’t
For everything’s built on a crooked slant,
And I think you’d know if you’d just admit it
That the answer is buried where God hid it.
And most of us haven’t the faintest clue
Except to keep smiling and see it through
Trying to say just where we went wrong,
Trying to sing that forgotten song,
Till we come to end of our crooked lives
Having been kind to our children and kissed our wives.
Farfox:
This broken life, this heap of scattered stones,
You think to make of this some better thing?
By taking thought, you hope to heal your bones?
And by some moaning hope to learn to sing?
My child, my child, give up this fruitless task.
The music of the spheres is not for you.
You do not know, my child, how much you ask.
As for something anyone can do.
As to make the sun itself be stilled
But do not ask for things that can’t be willed.
Always at the end of a year
Nothing seems right.
Night seems to have forever fallen.
On a dim day, the sun shines bright.
Tomorrow (the only reason for today)
Aligns itself with t thought and slight.
Take everything away but add that
Everything is not worth the taking,
Deny it how you might.
The wind upon the rock, it blew all night.
When morning came, the rock stood still
There where God has placed it on the hill.
The wind alone knew what it did was right.
Next morning, as I live, that rock took flight,
Became a bird and circled for the kill,
Dove and slew a lamb and drank its fill
Not by its own right, but by another’s might.
This rock, dear brothers is my stony heart
The wind, the breath of God blown clean and pure
Rock and wind are locked in deadly strife.
The Devil must take his proper part.
He held his face to me much like a mirror,
In this, the deadliest crisis of my life.
Harbrand:
I now believe with all my heart
that I can take a slice of time,
twist it tight in the sinews of art,
wrap it close in the cloak of rhyme,
make a whole of what was part
and sing that instant out of time.
Clan:
Believe, if you can, that the world is just.
In your case, at least, you simply must
Have become what you simply inevitably are.
You tried to escape it, you journeyed far
But came each time to same old place
Assumed at last the same old face,
Accepted that fate as a solemn gift,
But as for others, that just won’t shift.
A child that dies of some grim disease
Having never known love, having no ease--
You can’t say that child has known any justice
Or should have the least reason to listen or trust us
When we say that things have worked out for the best
So long as we die with our sins confessed.
So this is the task and it’s too hard for me
So I leave it to you and hope you agree
To accept for oneself the thing that is given
But know that for others the world is riven
With injustice inequity, suffering and sin
And you must never stop doing all in your power
To help those separate lives to flower
And having said that I lay down my pen
And offer my prayer and end with Amen.
Cuthbert:
and if the pain continue?
Farfox:
Then strength will call all weakness to its aid.
Will time declare a winner do you think?
Time will take the side of those who strive.
Time knows its place. The ally of persistence.
Neutral stuff, with scarce a vote to cast.
Cuthbert:
The dogs dug, howling, in the snow.
Snapping at the ice with angry jaws
Curious we stopped to help them
And found there, where the ground was hard,
Blood in puddles underneath the snow
But liquid, hot, as if it might have come
From throats cut fresh by desperate men
Whose lives had dwindled down to scattered change
Farfox:
Must beauty hide beneath the stone
Must fair things lie so near the bone?
Must ugliness conceal?
Does true faith heal?
When we pluck a golden rose
Must we suppose
Its beauty is a thing unique
with meanings that we know will leak
Away and leave us colder, colder still
Alone upon a windy hill?
Harbrand:
This firm, insistent, everlasting voice
This demon love who offers me no choice,
That claims my ear but then will scarcely speak
Or when it speaks, speaks half demotic Greek
Who, when I will not heed its muddled call,
Gives me nothing, takes from me all,
Shuts down my life, note by note,
Leaves me surrounded by a frozen moat.
Cuthbert:
What is this desperate bargain called your life?
Harbrand:
Deep in a folded dream lie the seeds of art
Stirring as I turn and reach for you.
Some work loose in the course of the night
And the great bear, tethered to the northern star
walks round his circle, spilling out the ragged
gauze that spreads across the sky.
Clan:
From the instance that you turn your face
To God, your heart moves toward perfection.
Everything that happens purifies
Your soul. Every joy adds to its bulk.
Every pain casts out some dross.
The world becomes a fiery crucible
To purify that part of you that goes
To live with God.
Listen, listen, you can hear
Music from another year.
Calling you to join the dance
Forget your mind and die entranced.
Borogrove:
Almagast watched the gentle shower
Thinking deep thoughts about work and power
Almagast watched the rain come down,
Wondering if he wanted the crown
That pressed on his head and made him frown
That burrowed deep inside his heart,
Demolished his evenings and stifled his art.
He listened for music but all that he heard
Was the rustle of sticks and leaves that stirred,
Decaying in sunshine, a network of veins,
Sharper than crystals and deeper than pains.
The prayer that he prayed was one he brewed.
The words were awkward and stone-cold crude.
Slowly, slowly the bubbles rise.
To one clear vision of sacrifice.
Farfox:
Come lovely death, you long-sought guest.
On this thin edge I realize my quest.
Around the firelight’s ring, the goblins howl
Some frantic melody, half scream, half growl
Borogrove:
He thought it was done forever,
But it came howling back--
That beast from Hardhorn river
The slimy beast from the
black.
It came from a hundred places
In the fiercest of all attacks.
It reached to the inner spaces,
It stopped his mind in its
tracks.
Harbrand:
Call me, O call me to listen
No matter how empty the tune.
The wind parts the dark clouds wherever
A small boy looks up at the moon.
We rejoice in the dead sound of empty.
We cling to the saving dark.
The inside of beauty is always
That place where we make our mark.
Cuthbert:
What is poetry?
Harbrand:
The music just beyond the ear,
The song we only just can hear,
The dance of t things we think stand still,
The yearning half in love with will.
Cuthbert:
What is the purpose of poetry?
Harbrand:
To make a song which bends the world
Into a curve through which we’re hurled
To orchestrate each single note
So it can never ever float.
Clan:
Our suffering builds a path for God to send
His love. Rest easy in your suffering.
It has work to do and dawn will come
When that night’s work is done. Stroke
Your pain the way you’d stroke your cat
That noise you hear is not him purring,
But it tells you your ears are working.
A force that walks behind you
Picking up debris
Putting it in burlap bags
Where it cannot flee
Deep inside those burlap bags
Forces are at work
Silent as an Arab
Dangerous as a Turk
Borograve:
Failure, failure failure, cry the furies
The gnomes of Christendom
Beat their wings about my head
Wet, horned feathers, smelling of old
carrion and dust.
Such emptiness wells up
in the dry valleys of despair,
song bursts forth, and flowers.
Emptiness so absolute
One can only call it beautiful,
Emptiness which calls all
Things to itself with a
voice so awesome all eternity
Hearkens and pours itself toward that
Eternal center which it cannot enter.
Cuthbert:
Rising fully from the dark
A formal answer.Cool winds blow from off deep stones
and dry the sweat that beads the back of your hand.
Duck your head and enter the damp cave
Stand in the gloom and let edges
of your breath grow smooth.
Half light is best to see important things.
Then the wind will slowly rise and fall
become a voice, indistinct at first
Then steadying, then rising to a scream
and saying: direct and indirect are both
the same. The seeds of martyrdom are down...
Farfox:
Why do kingdoms fade and fall away,
End in a waste of power and decay?
Deny me everything but do not give
Negation to the very power to live.
Everything I sought has gone away.
Sadness is the night and noon and day.
Damnation is the only life I know.
Any hope is gone that I must grow.
You seldom see a man come down this low.
Protect me now, my fatal flaw,
The abyss consumes me. All is law.
Doom surrounds us. Loss abounds.
Drift and crisis. Empty sounds.
Edges beckon, walls close in.
Splendor weakens. All is sin.
The burden shifts with a grating sound,
That rock in your hand? What would you pound?
Harbrand:
We pluck a phrase fresh from some living word
Light it like a flame beside a grave
I’ll have it sing to me, a subtle bird
Whose music can be heard while worlds rave.
And that same sound still beating in my ear
Will stand against the world’s angry roar
A shard of crystal truth, a song, sheer
Amplitude that makes the spirits soar.
Those who mock me vent their scorn in vain
Their cries mere notes that yield their puny force
To these controlling harmonies, as pain
Which dies because it knows its source.
Farfox:
Death is not such a little thing.
It comes not on cat feet’
Climbing the back fence quietly.
Today I saw it, looming large.
In the river of life it swam.
On upstream it wandered, idly
Naming the grasses and stones as it swam,
Agreeing with those along the way,
Reasonable in what it said,
Yet implacable in its dignity.
Clan:
Rough as stone beneath the surface
Of an ancient buried lake
Where the waves were caught and hardened
Where the spirits stayed awake.
Borgrave:
Black mornings come sudden on us, dank.
The blackest morning that I ever knew,
A dog came in, shook himself and drank.
Since, then, I’ve felt a stranger, passing through,
Like water where a casual stone was thrown and sank,
Sat there a year, or three, the mud en-
casing it, algae drifting in the soft half light,
A handsbreadth of minnows there, then gone.
Water cleft by stone gains second sight.
Each day’s dark produces next day’s dawn.
Arbitrary beauty stores its trust
Inside its bones. The darkness there relents
But once a season, then only to adjust
Its skirts and sigh. Such peculiar sense
Takes on the quality of holy lust,
As if a mare in heat were drowned
And found her aching loins were cooled and satisfied.
O Gods of hope, let godliness be crowned.
Let those survive who’ve looked on you, and died.
Farfox:
May all the ways I never went
Be paths down which I must be sent
If I choose wrongly, Lord, forgive
And grant me grace that I may live
To choose again and rightly do
The things that you would have me do.
Harbrand:
Rhythm’s curve can heal the searing hurts.
Blank verse, dear Lord, is all that one asserts.
I speak for form. No one appears to listen.
But in the dark, dark things move and glisten.
Clan:
The work that you were put on earth
To do is done. Now what’s left? To go
On doing it again and yet again,
Or find a different way to pick the burden
Up. When life no longer lies about to pick
And eat, why, they you go and dig for it.
To do a job in full knowledge of its
Uselessness is joy. Anything less is cheating.
Flashes of beauty in among the rocks,
A rotted leaf, a mound of crusted snow,
The rich satisfaction of art,
Or just the sense of weariness itself,
The knowledge that you share the dark.
You can hear them breathing. If you can’t,
Your own breath’s grown too loud. Be still.
Clan:
Aging is a simple thing, let
Go and it happens.
Everyone has to do it.
No one is exempt. It
Climaxes a long argument with Fate, but
In the slovenliness of the moment
Everyone forgets that all one has to do is
Slide into the arms of God.
Borograve:
When Almagest begins to dance
Every fortune turns to chance.
Anyone who fails to spin
Kisses the pit that sucks him in.
Mirrors reflect the things we see.
Such sights as these don’t set us free.
Only the hope of a broken dream
Can save the milk or sweeten the cream
Or give us a sign of a larger life,
One that is free of tumble and strife.
Life seems holy and true and good
Carved from a block of sandalwood,
Smelling of sweetness and salt and spice
When Almagast dances with birds and mice.
Clan:
Brothers, loss is just a name for God.
God works with lack, his finest clay to hand,
Not clinging tight to what was never ours.
Only he whose work has come to nothing
Can know the joy Christ brought to earth.
Nothingness, pressed tight against the eyes,
Can clear the head and cause the heart to sing.
What God must tear away from us is gone,
But what we throw away is given back.
This pain you feel because your life’s a fraud
Is just the loving hand of the living God.
Place each day’s loss upon the funeral pyre.
Seek emptiness and clasp it to your chest.
Give half away, then give away the rest.
In silence, seek the God you never knew,
And trust him only then to speak to you.
Farfox:
Stunned, my vision waited upon the Lord.
I walked along the path beside the steam
Alive in the autumn chill to glory’s dream
But something came and cut the magic cord,
Something came, and silent was the word.
The spirit suddenly grew weak and lame
Cringing in the light of heaven’s beam
The dragon stirred beside his ancient hoard
Hardened steel seemed to lose its temper
Life which seemed too short now seemed long
The wounding elements quite suddenly grew sharp
Enemies I knew had multiplied their number
What could I do but fold my hands and sing
And find my way this time without a map.
Clan:
Partially is what we have,
Sad and broken bits of gray.
Against it, we carry the word
Like a talisman, an amulet.
Behold, in the buffeting it shines the more.
Harbrand:
I’ll pluck a phrase fresh from some living word
Light it like a flame beside a grave
I’ll have it sing to me, a subtle bird
Whose music can be heard while words rave.
And that same sound still beating in my ear
Will stand against the world’s angry roar
A shard of crystal truth, a song, sheer
Amplitude that makes the spirits soar.
Those who mock me vent their scorn in vain
Their cries mere notes that yield their puny force
To these controlling harmonies, as pain
Which subsides because it knows its source.
Clan:
What is it that beckons from yonder wooed
Free from taint of will or should
What calls us forth at dawn to look?
Something more than tree or brook
Listen, listen, and listen again
Music softer than thrush or wren . . .
Borograve:
Elevate the gleaming host
Father, Son , and Holy Ghost
Pain is such a common thing
Tilt your head, the birds will sing
They will sing a solemn song.
Much is right, though much is wrong
Two lives converge at blinding speed
Grasp the nettle, seize the reed.
Nettle green, and tipped with fire,
Weak and paltry funeral pyre.
Weaker reed, too weak to break,
Bend for your dear sister’s sake.
Vision sweet descend on me
Consume it all both leaf and tree
Let he hear the planet’s hum
Plotinus’ caw and Plato’s sum.
Great voices penetrate the mire.
What they say we dare aspire.
Cuthbert:
Hell still had beckoned him
Onto battles at the rim,
Past normal limits, past the touch
Of kindness. Further on past much
In life he would have wanted
Had he not felt driven, haunted,
By the All he could become.
What was he now but just some
Creature driven by power and lust,
Pitifully digging beneath the crust
Of a simple tidy, moral life
And finding only empty strife?
Farfox:
The visible world dances
To the beat of a distant drum
Round go the wheels of fortune
An insistent, consuming hum.
Chance is the blood’s redemption,
Things will not be as they are,
Space ace is born in an instant,
In the random heat of a star.
Release us O God from the prison
Where icicles hang on the wall,
Show us that land of enchantment
Where life is dangerously small.
Where time is a friend of the moment,
And all we know is the fall,
Where the shark has teeth like a baby,
And Yeats will come at a call.
Where the wind blows in from the future,
And snow drifts in from the past,
In a slip of our foot on the pavement,
The first of our lives will be last.
Farfox:
I will not seek relief from my own hand,
Although my spirit’s staked on the burning sand.
Though all around me crumble into dust
Though all be stripped away, save trust.
Though I don’t wish it, this is where I dwell
Knowing all I need and want to know of hell.
Cuthbert:
Spring and hope have had their chance
To frolic, shout and shower
Now blood, the kingdom’s crowning touch
Is gathering for power.
Borogrove:
Bring on the broad sword, helm and ax.
Retreat’s a cry used by the lax.
On toward the bridge, it’s ours by dawn
Again and yet again until out fear is gone,
Dashed by hate, with heaven’s help.
Course on, O blood, beneath my scalp.
All thought is over. Sweet revenge
Steams hot with every swordsman’s lunge.
To the belly and eye the knife shall plunge.
The rain of hope is at an end
The time of talk is past.
The armored troops of long ago
Upon the plains are massed.
The angry words of youth and fire
Are gathering in the gloom
While long-poised agencies of power
Come spinning from the tomb.
Call upon the troops of Pim.
Onward into hell with him.
Neither fire or desperate news
Fails to give us useful clues.
Everywhere we see the marks.
Results are gathering in the parks.
Even when we stop to sleep,
We know the mystery will keep.
Rolling forth into the world
Till the world’s evil’s hurled
Out into the final dark.
Hear the angels, hear them, hark!
Confusion’s master, lord of those who know,
Arise and fill the air with dancing snow.
Call forth the armies, let the timbrels swell
Till all the earth is shaking like the roots of hell.
Block out the songbirds, and if the wind would blow,
Let its noise be swallowed in our show.
Cuthbert:
He held his place in the world by sheer effort, nailing himself to
reality by a constant stream of words.
He made his way through the world as a person might make his way
up stream in an agonizing crawl, not daring to stop for fear of being
swept downstream.
He was like a person suspended over an abyss by the rope of words, the
rope always fraying and always having to reweave it by a constant
stream of new words. The longer he dwelt in silence, the more
frayed the rope became, stretching, allowing him to sink down into
darkness and confusion.
Others seemed to exude self. He had to create it day by day in
laborious exercises of discipline and solitude. When he had gone
through the effort of creating enough to last an ordinary day, there
was scarcely enough energy left to do anything else.
Clan:
Ashen, stumbling from a rumpled bed,
The long night’s struggle thick upon his skin,
Dry and weary but somehow cleansed and led
To visions of a world drained of sin.
A world where t things mean only what they seem,
Where things are heavy with their own being,
Alive in God’s immortal constant dream,
A tree, a leaf become a total seeing.
Harbrand:
Silence is the kindest enemy
I know. He kills with comfort’s quiet kiss,
Inlaid with all the things you’ll never miss,
And all the things you forgot you’d be.
Your failures shade you like an ancient tree.
You feel a kind of inverted bliss,
But is that sound you hear a hiss,
Or just the wind from just beyond the lee?
Look around you. Isn’t that your dream?
Do the pieces rattle when they’re shaken.
Will they make a sound that God will hear?
If I say “excuse me” will it seem
As if an undue liberty is taken,
As if I paid too much for something dear?
Farfox:
You ask me why I wait this way
Holding the harsh world at bay?
I listen hard for the voice of God
Who sings to those who might have trod
Across the world in velvet boots.
Worms lie coiled among the roots
Of frozen trees. All things hold still
Because they know that God will fill
Their hearts with love enough to do
His work and serve those who
Are cryng out for his own touch.
By helping them I find my crutch.
We both walk thus across the day,
And that is why I wait this way.
Cuthbert:
Full of hope and twice as large
As any city water barge,
Farfox stumbles through the day
With only energy to say
He wishes he were better than
This silly tool of other men.
He knows this world that presses in
Is just a world of cloth and tin.
Another world is close to hand,
A sweet and gracious, wooded land.
The way to enter such a place
Is just to find a slower pace,
To find a moment’s solitude,
A time to pause and gape and brood.
But meeting this and deadline that,
Make a living, feed the cat.
And yet he knows when all is said
These humble things of salt and bread
Are really what he’s called to do.
Those splendid worlds of art and song,
They pull his ragged soul along.
They give him strength, they give him hope,
They keep him upright on the slope.
Yet always, always, while he works,
He knows another world lurks--
Its music plays, however dim.
He knows it plays, in part for him.
Clan:
Shape versions of integrity with grace
Seek release from local time and space.
Run swiftly in the endless race,
And you will earn at least an honest face.
A man’s first duty is to work
To sink as low as he needs to
To find a service he can do the world
and make a wage, enough to eat.
His next is to create,
To give back to the world
In whatever form he can, the forms
That come to him in dreams.
Harbrand:
We think, and yet we don’t know what we speak.
Our words hold back their secret source of power
The strength we knew at dawn, we now see leak
away to come again at some more solemn hour.
If we can but turn away from direct apprehension
and labor to bring forth what vision knows.
The night’s redemption always brings the dawn.
Excavation of the pale debris
reveals only emptiness, yet
emptiness is what the mind requires
to know that distant fullness.
The great joke that art has played on me
Nothing comes except through irony.
And when the gate of irony is closed
No questions but eternal ones are posed.
Farfox:
Under the windblown surface of my life
Swim the calm fish of ancient seas
Easing slowly through the current’s breeze.
Their sensuous fins do not appear to move
They have no truth they need or want to prove.
They find food--adequate, enough
To feed their dreams, in fact such stuff
As makes a dream become at last a vision,
A clarity of sight, a firm decision.
Harband:
The darkness beckons, the wilderness calls
The worm has flown where the butterfly crawls.
I dig at the rock with the wing of a bird
I don’t make much progress, but haven’t you heard,
The rock that I loosen with my endless toil
Is taken by wind and reborn as soil.
Farfox:
Before I felt like a person making his way across a no-man’s land, at
first with no help and later with God’s help, which I pried daily out
of the rock with a disciplined routine. But quite suddenly, grace
which I had mined by the dropperful became a flood. Instead of
making my way across a battlefield, I am carried along on a
flood. Before, I was so overwhelmed with life that I could
scarcely pray; now I am so overwhelmed by prayer that I can scarcely
live. Before, we saw our task as living in the world as best we
could and Grace a means to that end. Now we see our task as
enjoying that Grace while living is simply something we do to occupy
our times as we do so. The end used to be living and Grace the
means. Now Grace becomes the end and living the means.
Cuthbert:
He wanted salvation to be a pearl to be dived for in the dark waters of
grisly fact, not a broad accessible sun that beat down on
your head whether you wanted it to or not..
All his life he fought against self-loathing, and self-loathing had
induced despair. Not only feeling bad, but feeling bad about
feeling bad. But what if self-loathing were the truth? What
if it were appropriate in the circumstances? Then and only then
could the flower blossom. Then and only then could glory be
revealed. The mistake had been to fight against self-loathing, to
hate himself for hating himself, thus raising self-loathing to the
second power. But to see self-loathing as forgiven sin was to
take away the exponent, and eventually to reverse it. He could
then, in a sense, love himself for hating himself and
self-loathing would dissolve in a wonderful paradox.
Farfox:
On a cold morning, just before the dawn,
I woke and took me from my bed.
All my ancient strength had long since gone.
None of my friends cared if I were dead.
Glowing in the coals from last night’s fire,
Embers of my memory burned low.
All the elements of my desire
Rocked my stern heart to and fro.
Shadows ran over the hot coals,
Quick, like wind across distant water.
I felt none of my assorted roles
Would bring back youth or my dead daughter.
What I wanted, I neither could nor should.
I piled up the fire with new wood.
Death is not such a little thing.
It doesn’t come on cat feet,
Climbing the back fence quietly.
Today I saw it, looming large.
In the river of life it swam.
On up the stream it wandered, idly
Chatting with grasses and stones as it went,
Agreeing with some few along the way,
Reasonable in what it said to them,
Implacable when it chose not to listen
Harbrand:
It is just as awful as they say.
We long to fill the space with anything,
A women’s touch comes closest and will nearly do.
but if we stay alone,
God fills the space with his own flesh made word
That logos burns again
As it once burned in dark tales
Where God wrote poems with spears and nails.
Cuthbert:
Obscurity’s invention can salvage this round thing.
What pain of restitution comes upon us now.
The simplest gesture sets the ground on fire.
Danger is all that keeps the world alive
And certain possibilities that lurk beyond the dark.
Farfox:
”Come lovely death, you long-sought guest.
On this thin edge I realize my quest.
Around the firelight’s ring, the goblins howl
Some frantic melody, half scream, half growl.
Take me away to where dead silence reigns
Eternally, where blessed blackness deigns
Revenge, and those who feel, feel only pains.
Great God, is t here some meaning in this hurt?
Can any lesson come from this, I blurt?
Hargrave:
Words, we know, are just a hollow sound
Yet in these things, more than hope is found.
Farfox:
We will build a city, brothers)
A city that no mind can dream away,
Nor war destroy what mind has dreamed in place.
From the river’s edge the capital will rise,
A filigree of stone against the sky.
The rough-cut rock will blacken with the years
And honor time by darkening her hue.
Her towers will reach so far into the sky,
They will seem hung by spider’s webs from clouds.
Cuthbert:
The brothers want to settle down.
Farfox wants to build a town.
Pity Farfox in his hope.
He will stumble, he will grope.
His dream will be like all the rest.
Lose its flavor, lose its zest.
Dwindle down to dust and ashes.
When his teeth he grinds and gnashes,
We ill dance and taunt him then.
Silly mortal, silly men.
Farfox:
This marbled hour, this silken time
Is what we know of heaven’s climb
The world’s a press, my head is in it,
And I must ransom just his minute.
Grace says abide, the will accedes,
But only if the spirit leads.
A solemn music always sings,
But all we hear is the voice of things.
The world stands poised to hear our song,
And wobbles when we sing it wrong.
We lean into the winds of fate
And hope our song is not too late.
A softer wind blows closer down
And brushes the smallest specks of ground;
The winds of heaven blow near to the earth.
We listen hard for the sounds of birth.
Harbrand:
This raging noise inside my skill
Is it destiny
Or just the noise of loneliness
Trying to set me free?
Borogrove:
Choke on thy spleen, dear.
Cursed be your breath.
Thou art a fat pig, you cur,
Dying a slow death.
Curse you and your farts
And this benediction:
Curse be your lame verse,
And cursed be your diction.
O thee I love to hate,
Odious bucket of pig slops,
May Hades be your fate,
Doled out in small drops.
Clan:
Only a language
Hard and dark
Will let you breathe
Or make your mark
Only a language
pure and stark
will contain your vision
or receive your mark
deeper darker
further down
The drop of water’s
the only sound
The only truths are
found in caves
The only light
Is the pain that saves
The world rejects you
Its usual price
To drive you into
The arms of Christ
riddled and shattered
stone from stone
Mind from heart
And Bone from bone
Sinew from muscle
Hip from thigh
Ear from listen
Vision from eye
Everything separate
Nothing will cleave
Nail from finger
Grief from grieve
Everything carried
To the ends of space
Everything riven
Runner from race.
Cuthbert:
These moments when nothing seems an accident, when every broken
fingernail looks like a brick in a structure built according to iron
laws with the express purpose of making you happy.
Harbrand:
The common fabric of our common life
is scarcely redeemable.
Art is a pointed stick we thrust
into the heart of each day’s work,
hoping it will burst to flame.
Farfox:
The soul is made of God’s own stuff
And turns to him in utter love.
When like to like calls loud enough,
God will answer, like a dove.
God will go where there is room--
There within the empty tomb,
Less is more and more is less.
He needs space and emptiness.
Grant me grace to cast aside
All things heavy, even pride.
Help me let them go, like stone,
And rest with you, in you, alone.
Clan:
Virgin mother, pray for me
Christ who came to set me free
Was borne by you in a dirty stable
That all who call on you are able
To witness to the truth of God
To the broken, homeless and the odd.
Farfox:
Thus fortified, I go through fire,
Powerless and naked, without goals,
And determined to take no action.
Cuthbert:
Keep faith, keep faith
Stir the deep waters
In the deep waters swim the lovely fish
I will crumple your life like a bit of paper,
Laugh in the moonlight, call it a caper,
Something done quickly, done at a touch,
Ransomed from silence and sickness and such.
And leave you free to issue forth
And give you strength to undertake
Your trials will give you new strength
The thirst will begin to slake.
Clan:
Where we are is where God has put us and with good reasons, because
this particular kind of challenge is what our soul needs at this
particular moment to bring it into harmony with His divine will for our
greater happiness and the world’s greater good.
Cuthbert:
Sailing on a checkered sea,
Algemenst beheld a flea.
In the icy brine he dove
Never did he find that trove.
Tell us then, just why he strove.
Farfox:
Ever and into a deepening hollow of
Kingdom’s forgiveness we stagger: a blindness, a
Torture, a token of all the remorse we have
Offered, exchanged for a smattering of hope in a
circle, a cup of the liquid our Lord gave in
Earnest the night he was offered in love for the
Sins we committed in thoughtless abandon.
Through Christ’s wounds the world entered him
Through my wound, Christ enters me
Harbrand:
Each written thing, when you begin to write
Moves toward ends foreknown in someone’s sight
Summons aid from dark and unknown sources
Deep beneath the ground where water courses.
Cuthbert:
Time will heal you. Hold it tight
Forever’s just a shift of light.
Clan:
Odell lifted up his hands and cried:
Cobblestone sticks and round about
Heaven can sing but hell can shout.
What have you seen? What have you given?
With what have you struggled,
With what have you striven?
What have you done to find things out?
Better do that than rave and shout.
All of that hope, all of that giving,
All of it gone in the daily living.
All that we ask is your daily reading,
But still you prefer your daily bleeding.
Cultivate failure, seek its bower.
There you will find a quiet hour.
Flee the obvious. Embrace the dark
That desperate scream is a meadow lark.
What’s easily said is always false.
Lies can sing and evil waltz.
Cuthbert:
The voice of Harbrand sounds across the bay,
The water ripples and the ripples stay.
So much to learn, so little time to live.
So much to take and so few gifts to give.
Harbrand:
And now the dark descends again
Taking me to that world of men
whose pain becomes their central core
Who cannot feel one agony more.
Bitter fruit from one, indeed,
to seemed to spring from damaged seed.
Is this pain all your force can bring?
I can take it, that and sing.
But O great God is this your way
The only way that you can say
That I have lost the solemn path
And feel now something more than wrath?
I have given my soul away,
The hounds have brought me clean to bay
I can suffer, suffer it all
Nothing can break me, I will not fall.
My job is to suffer and write it down,
Carry the news from town to town.
What voice speaks through me when I do well?
How do I live in this living hell?
When others watch me what do they think?
Do they know the lowest one can sink.
What is the answer, what can I do?
What drug shall I take? What muse shall I woo?
Am I being punished for some wrong choice
Or called to hear another voice.
Am I to make some firm resolve?
What would happen? What would it solve?
Am I being hammered into some new shape?
Is this some form of angelic rape?
What is the answer? What is goal?
Shall I go looking for this pain’s cause?
Will I somehow find inexorable laws
Whose workings will give the world new hope,
or at least a better laundry soap?
Partly to punish, partly to share,
Partly so I and others may care,
The curtain comes down, the dark descends
To satisfy some larger ends.
How will we look for a better life
Except with the tools of pain and strife?
I will work my way down, however deep.
I will go without food, I will go without sleep.
I will rise in the dark and wait in the dawn,
And when the smoke clears, I’ll be moving on
looking for distance, looking for form
In the pieces of cold, in the spaces of warm.
Farfox:
Five years I have served in the house of the Lord,
The wheel turns round again
The sun lurches toward a terrible solstice
Shredding my comfort as it climbs toward noon.
Dawn breaks on a flat and leaden waste
Of my three and fortieth year.
Faith becomes the burden it was meant to be
And I am dragged screaming into procession
With Abraham, poised above his startled son,
Torn by visions I did not want to see
Giving all I know and feeling torn from me
That which I did not even know I had.
The great hollowing hand of God gouges deep into
My soul, making stone caves where only a limestone
Does its slow work and reminds me:
Real pain is better than false anything
Even false happiness, and so I will not say
Spare me this choosing, spare me this saving.
Instead I say: This burden though I cannot lay it down,
Has been set on fire, and I carry it in living arms.
Cuthbert:
Gone soft along its southern edge, the moon
Hangs low in the eastern sky. It deigns to tell
Me where in space my soul will finally dwell.
It tells me only that I won’t know soon.
Then out across some reeded lake, a loon
Cries out, and those who hear it feel the swell
Of throat that tells them all may yet be well
While dark sings truth in such a piercing tune.
The moon grows thin, then fat, then thin again.
Abruptness is a thing it does not know
But changes are its life and also mine.
If the moon should tear itself away, what then?
The curse of gravity is strong but slow,
Its arc a comforting but terrible sign.
Harbrand:
Down in the caverns of darkness
Around in the whirl of pain
Knowing only the taste of failure
And the rocks on the rock-strewn plain
Tonight we venture toward doomsday
Another takes our hand
When heaven comes in a broomstick,
We walk in the loosening sand
The anger that flows in my bloodstream,
The rage that devours my heart,
Is nothing compare to the river
That divides the mind from its art.
As quick as I go into hiding,
Demons find me and take hold of my soul.
What the angels are doing won’t answer
Or make my right hand whole
Must I lie down in darkness forever
Driven and cold and alone?
With only the hum of the street lamp
A distant and dangerous tone?
Such noises come often at midnight.
They disturb me and won’t go away--
An itch that refuses to answer,
The scratch that keeps it at bay.
Voices of silence consume us
We push to the edge of too much.
We cannot deliver the package
From out of the world’s clutch.
If I have listened too close to the music
That tells me to call it my friend,
Then who will befriend me at sunrise,
When the music comes to an end?
The darkness, the darkness will save us,
The quiet, the quiet at dawn,
A pen moving over the paper
Spirit and Word coming on.
At last, at last comes salvation
An emerging sense of the self.
It batters its way to the surface,
that wily illusive old elf--
Summoned by rhythms and meters
He stifles his burgeoning pride
He releases his grip on my heartstrings,
He comes to stand by my side.
Call me, O call me to listen
No matter how empty the tune.
The wind parts the dark clouds wherever
A small boy looks up at the moon.
I rejoice in the dead sound of empty.
I cling to the saving dark.
The inside of beauty is always
That place where we make our mark.
Cuthbert:
Farfox took his brother’s hands
Held them in a tight circle around the fire.
Farfox:
You and I both know, brother,
I was never meant to win
Some great acclaim. To ache will have to be enough.
My hope of greatness filled a shapely void
But had no life not based on neediness.
To live with failure is a noble task,
I have borne it well enough.
Christians are supposed to fail in the world
Supposed to be inadequate, grateful
tenuous, unsure, awestruck, confused, and partial,
sensing more than they know,
knowing only what cannot be said but only thought,
endlessly circling the bases,
touching in turn terror, adoration, peace,
stranded often on one or the other,
coming occasionally home to the curious mixture
of all three, which we call glory.
Pain is insight waiting to happen.
All the powers of darkness stand against us.
All the angels stand in vast array.
Why should it take the power of heaven to give us
Strength to face an ordinary day
Come give me that bundle of tinder and sticks.
Common as ashes and heavy as bricks.
We will build us a fire that will reach to the sky
So men will ask questions and never know why.
Deep in their hearts they will ponder His power,
Asleep in the twilight, not knowing the hour.