‘… I rose up and am still with you.’
‘Let Him Not Lose What He So Dear Hath Bought.’

From Cell 25 of the Convent of San Marco, by Blessed John of Fiesole, OP (Fra Angelico), 15th Century
Think on the very làmentable pain,
Think on the piteous cross of woeful Christ,
Think on His blood beat out at every vein,
Think on His precious heart carvèd in twain,
Think how for thy redemption all was wrought:
Let Him not lose what He so dear hath bought.
–Pico della Mirandola (translated by St Thomas More)
‘… Wounded for Our Iniquities …’
‘… he was wounded for our iniquities, he was bruised for our sins….‘
My Pronouns
My pronouns are he, him, and his
Because I’m in the sperm-making biz
Or at least I was
Till I met Dr. Buzz
And now all I’ve got is plain jiz.
But the I and the Thou are the ones
That make me wanna shoot off my guns
For the love of Buber
When I’m catching an Uber
And hitting the driver with puns.
Reruns
becoming myself
could actually happen
i believe it could
on a rainy day
as leaves fall and paste themselves
to pavements and feet
walking familiar
paths to places known too well
shod in shoes worn out
if i were a rich man
counting money like syllables
then maybe i could rest
in increasing luxury
like a poem forming line by line
instead of worrying time
but i am more like
a haiku stanza falling
into line with you
and wishing i could
become myself with vengeance
and take you with me
My dad gave me
My dad gave me
The history
Of future things
That he could see
And when I saw
The fatal flaw
He showed how mercy
Breaks the law
My mom and I
My mom and I
Flew through the sky
Towards the sun
On wings of why
We circled high
And in her eye
Some kindness answered
To my cry
We were poets once and young…
…or younger, anyway.
So JOB was visiting the Dappled Things website, as one does, and he stumbled across this in the “featured poem of the day” department: a little ditty he composed a while back for some M.L. character…
I do so love “ogling theologians.”
[Image: Gargoyles at Notre Dame, and the Café Grotesque mascots they inspired.]
It’s Walker Percy’s Hundredth Birthday and We Suck
… but here’s the beginning of an epic poem about the time a young man met the man himself:
November 22, 1989
The day I met Walker, the rain had fallen
in Louisiana sheets, and I’d left
my tent illicitly pitched in the Bogue Falaya
State Park, along with a bookish bottle
of Early Times I’d taken a few swigs off of
in the dark the night before as pine cones pitched
and fell outside as if in triadic morse code
from Flannery in heaven telling me grace was in
the river. And alligators, too, I reckoned.
I walked the cracked sidewalks of Covington, aimlessly,
dazed by the wonder of seeing vines sprouting
through the cracks in a sacramental vision,
a concelebration of the namer and the named,
and lept across the flashflood puddles
as I made my way towards no destination
but found myself in The Kumquat bookstore
to oggle shelves bursting with signed copies
of The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot,
The Second Coming, The Thanatos Syndrome, Lost
in the Cosmos, The Message in the Bottle, books
that had changed (and continue to change) my life.
Oh Walker (Oh Rory) I was twenty-four
and pining for a woman I was also
on the run from in triangular
despair (yet thanks in part to you I also
was aware, at least a little — a foothold —
of the despair, contrary to that Kierkegaardian
epigraph, precisely pitched though it is).
Oh Walker: so I bought a stack of books,
some for me and some for those I loved,
and left instructions with the keeper of
the store to have you encode, in your
physician’s scrawl, your cracked prescriptions
where the vines of love and truth might grow from bourbon
and ink, the cumulative bliss of limitation,
where you and I might clear a space for being.
I Don’t Wanna Go to Mass
Something Potter came up with after his daughter said she didn’t want to go to mass. Apparently he was trying to one-up her in the anti-mass department.
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