When I say Jesus
in these poems,
I hope you don’t think
that I think
that I know
with any real precision
what I’m talking about.
When a stone
says yes
to one day
returning to
the shimmering heart of a star,
and the star says yes
to beaming that stone’s endless heart
through all of space and time,
and the gravity inside of every
pebble, rock, and speck of sand
becomes a continuum of Meaning,
it becomes difficult to say
just what exactly that
stone has become,
or what all those other stones
are really up to.
What seems most important,
is that after years of wandering
from town-to-town,
gathering in taverns
or caves by the sea
to listen to sages and saints,
after walking across miles
of starlit landscapes,
some nights torn asunder
by the tensions of possibility and custom,
others rescued from the void
by the touch of a friend–
after latching onto and exploding insights
like a two-legged supernova
trying on three piece suits
made of granite,
a choice was made
to embrace Love so fully,
so completely,
that in the blink of an eye
that dove into the gap
between the disappearance
of the last second on the scoreboard
and the settling
of all that dust in the arena,
Existence itself suddenly realized:
I just swallowed myself whole.
Now Jesus is gone.
You and I have emerged–
a field of daffodils protected by snowy mountains.
There is a meaning in that
only the stones can explain,
a mysterious contour we trace together
through the darkness,
our hands linked in an endless chain
reaching back all the way
to the Beginning.
When I say you and I
in these poems,
I hope you don’t think
that I think
that I know
with any real precision
what I’m talking about.
That’s why we have Jesus,
to explain it to us.
