All the punctuation of life

Drained away by what just happened

Everything there and nothing makes sense

Who can sleep or go on a walk in darkness when my Jesus

Thinking of how the rising and setting never stops we have no control or say over it even when we pretend to with our changing the clocks forward or backward by an hour at two thirty in the morning twice a year until the lawmakers decide to do away with it like Arizona doesn’t have to because it never did and I don’t have to use my phone to see

Everything is not the way it seems it should be A list can be a poem can be a psalm

That time when you prodigal checked out a book from the library and a paper two thirds in around page 234 fell open unbleached flour eggs oats and raisins carrots celery with leaves tomatoes basil fish with coin in mouth apples and pears ginger and cinnamon lamp oil milk low fat or oat almonds cashews lost coin pistachios one quart of not ultra pasteurized full fat milk a costly pear and two lemons for stovetop cheese some family left their grocery list in the book when they returned it

No stasis is the universal stasis

Even in Sabbath there is no resting not really

Just getting out of bed is a kind of work involving the lungs by breathing in the air evolving the gases for oxygenating the muscles and bones removing restrictions of the day revolving already prepared food from yesterdays and the devolving swallowing drinking chewing mulling over overhanging the clothing out drying on the line solving eliminating releasing resolving all the moments stacking on top piling too many steps he thirsts the poor the crippled the lame the blind all who know that something is wrong with them that no amount of money can fix and now this hope dashed in the dregs of the mix

When the Word dies language gets lost night falls into day

I’ve lost trees to storms

Apple in the back yard plum in the front

When lightning split them in two ripped from top to bottom like a curtain torn

Trading one kind of motion for another as they stopped turning sunlight into green drawing water and food up from the ground and out into light but disintegrating down and feeding other foods we grow like the tulips and daffodils we plant in the crumbly amended soil of my once carefully curated lunch where sandy sadly weed mixed fertile they used to stand with such beauty and pride the plum flowers the fig withers I see the tree that is not a tree at all what was once a majestic curtain now just a pile of fabric on the floor

Dark night in daylight I lost friends to fast cancers like crabs scuttling away unnoticed but there in blood or brain nothing like this in the way I think they somehow hide hurt and cry they saw him heard him declare him washed perfumed graveclothes swaddled his full adult body in the borrowed tomb a different kind of manger finished

From darkest Peru wild pigs dive off the cliffs flying down to their deaths at his word for just one man made whole now the lamb slain and lain and all the people everyone who has ever lived

Rolled stone closed the door too heavy to move ever again never by mankind ever to be moved and only grief and loss London England no one to look after us bears where I hid hope daring to dream dreams dashed despair where no other man would ever really go there they laid him as the women go with more herbs and salve or just to wail and weep because bereft nothing left hiding in the cleft all the stories and parables and laughter

We who wash can never come clean who will wash away grief when only that is left the only real love we have ever known or will know where has he gone Jesus his love in every sentence and breath that day was gone drained washed away changed really dead yet every moment a movement toward the death of death and with morning light like a gardener ushers in the period never known or thought or dreamed before

All the Saturday mysteries we carry

Cleaned and gone with one word, “Mary.”