St. Thomas

Once,
The wind
Was a burning
Ember.
And it was in His eyes.
And He turned to us
And in His turning we became
A cell of Him,
That which contained him
And made a sacrifice
Of our ignorance,
The dull brutish density
That we struggled with
As we were only men
And He was love
And He turned to us , and knew
What was to come
And what
Were to be
Our failures.

*
There were times when looking into his face
Was like looking into death.
I had not guessed, none of us had guessed
That death could be so utterly calm ,
As it called for us to quit ourselves
And turn,
Inside the fire of our resistance
That was the fire of his consumption.

*

Love is the hardest thing there is.
The candle flickered.
The bees wax burned.I saw Him in my sleep.
I became awake during sleep.
And He was there
Arms in the air
And burning.
And when I looked closer I could see
That what I thought were flames
Were
Wave after wave
Of undulant bees
And He was the honeycomb
Ofa ruminant silence

**
There is more death in life
Than there is life.
There is more life in death
Than life can hold.
Emptiness.
It is emptiness that is the palimpsest
That He has held
For us to write on.
And in my dream I saw
What has to be done:
That we must be able to live
Inside the erasure . . .
To find
Within the absence
The zero untouched .
And inside the perfect zero
The golden mean
Divine proportion
Of the golden absence.

*

As I put my fingers into the wound
I did not know how to believe,
But I died
As I touched
The torn flesh
Of the man
Who had appeared to us
Us inside the locked room
The walls were white.
And the light assumed
The contours of the
Silent room.
That was when I had no doubt,
I had seen Him
That he was both man and God.
That his body was both body
And the form of
the Ghost.
A shape of our love
And the trials
To come.

Mark

With Trajan killing us for refusing to pour
wine,
. . . .I despaired of understanding the
new dispensation.
Saw myself for the dust I was, and
gave myself wholly to the silence of the Word
When suddenly, unexpectedly , the entire
scene was there
bright dove descending
the five thousand
a hill of skulls
I was suspended in that image- cloud
and saw
the agony of the rose
the arid landscape of Galilee.

And His face was there
which was beautiful
A shape of its word
and a shape of the silence
within the word.

So life comes to life in
illumination.
A place among the windy traces
and the dry hard earth
were love is wrung
from intimidation and threat,
the cruelest instinct,
of a cunning government,
choosing power over honesty
slight of hand above disclosure
to worship eagles and the gods
in dreams
as ignorant of their origin
as the syllables of air