A little privacy?
I cannot concentrate
on God with you watching
me. And obviously
I will write down later
all the interesting
details so young ladies
who wish to imitate
my example and see
the Lord God face-to-face
may do so properly
by work and poverty
obediance patience
and a well-becoming
unselfish chastity.
O this? You see I take
not one single earthly
pleasure from this, only
I enjoy the greatest
religious ecstacy,
for which you must behave
better than you believe
I have seen that look before.
At the writing-table, and
in bed. After hours of
practice. When I ask you why
you are angry and you say
that you aren’t, only just
trying to concentrate on —
On something. Once, you gathered
a newborn lamb in your arms
and quieted it with a
glance. Looked up, bit your lip to
look fierce and said, now I will
be serious enough for
the both of us, never fear.
What more could Daniel ask you for?
Bernini stretches him in prayer
While in the alcove just behind
Him, tame, the lion licks his heel.
Giant loaf of Irish soda bread
On a heavy platter, bless these hands
Passing you around the table. Let
Us not falter before we have had
Our desert: a taste that is of sweet
Plenty overpouring fullness that
Fills the empty glasses of our need.
Here, you say, there always will be more
Than enough left over. Take and eat.
If it were not blasphemous one could well
Imagine Him enthroned beneath it on
A matching bronze cast seat, acanthus leaves
Repeating in between the volutes of
The twice man sized Solomonic column
Supporting each armrest, His feet propped on
An Ottoman, receiving haughty prayers
From parishioners and ignoring the
Hum of tourists bumbling toward their
Next museum as quietly as bees.
after Marianne Moore
The muskrat,
“having all the best qualities
of the beaver but with
infinitely more charm”,
swims from bank
to bank of
likely water sources in search
for the best burrow place
he can provide his wife,
propelled by
webbed feet and
directed by the flattened scale–
bound rudder of his tail
which extends half his length.
The muskrat,
eager pro–
creator, is monogamous,
defends his family
by small underwater
entrances
into their
hovel, like the pangolin saves
his long claws for digging.
Like the pangolin he
seals his ears:
he against
the waters which he swims beneath
nearly twenty minutes
not needing new air, nor
noticed by
expectant
wake-watchful coyotes. “A sail–
boat was the first machine”,
invented when a mast
and canvas
were propped up
perpendicular to a raft
too long adrift. The musk–
rat is content to feed
from floating
platforms he
constructs without direction, like
his pushup hut when he
must build it above ground,
from offshoots
of the same
green stuff he eats. This Catholic fish
succeeds where many breeds
cannnot, protected from
sulfurous
waters by
a stubbornness which he mistakes
for grace, pursued, evades
his predators by his
industry.
Architect
and contractor, designer, he
receives the spring deluge
with equanimity
and prepares
to build a–
new. From wetland floor or shallow
streambed he brings up mud
with which he will refound
his house: mud
in which he
leaves the temporary pattern
of his twilit working
hours as he paces
back and forth
tail behind
him, night before, and contemplates
the inconsistent waves
that lap across his small
steady track.