The Lost Garden

by Dana Gioia

If ever we see those gardens again,
The summer will be gone—at least our summer.
Some other mockingbird will concertize
Among the mulberries, and other vines
Will climb the high brick wall to disappear.

How many footpaths crossed the old estate—
The gracious acreage of a grander age—
So many trees to kiss or argue under,
And greenery enough for any mood.
What pleasure to be sad in such surroundings.

At least in retrospect. For even sorrow
Seems bearable when studied at a distance,
And if we speak of private suffering,
The pain becomes part of a well-turned tale
Describing someone else who shares our name.

Still, thinking of you, I sometimes play a game.
What if we had walked a different path one day,
Would some small incident have nudged us elsewhere
The way a pebble tossed into a brook
Might change the course a hundred miles downstream?

The trick is making memory a blessing,
To learn by loss the cool subtraction of desire,
Of wanting nothing more than what has been,
To know the past forever lost, yet seeing
Behind the wall a garden still in blossom.


"The Lost Garden" by Dana Gioia, from Interrogations at Noon. © Graywolf Press, 2001.

Unholy Sonnet 4

I'd love to tell a hard tale of miserable abuse that I have suffered at the hands of conservative evangelicals that might excuse my tendency to push against them when in conversation. The thing is, I haven't suffered enough to have even a modestly-interesting story. I have issues, I guess, and those issues make me bristle in my soul whenever someone claims certainty about God--not certainty that God exists, but certainty about what He thinks or who He loves or doesn't love. Truth be told, I the only concept of God that doesn't set off angst in me is God as the source of unfathomable, unconditional love. That's my idol of choice.

It is no better and idol, really, than my Calvinist friend's 5-point, concrete system, and no better, really, than my brothers and sisters who picket funerals and claim to know with certainty that "God HATES Fags." Still, I choose Love. I say that it is better to throw away the scriptures than to use them in a violent, unloving way as a weapon against another. I say that God LOVES Fags at least as much as He loves self-righteous believers, women-haters and bigots.

But there I go, again, weighing this monologue to may way of thinking.

I love the way this poem, by Mark Jarman, strips away concepts of God as a thing--idolatrous versions of The Real God--and replaces that with the Truth that God is NO-THING, and therefore beyond concepts of God. Jesus is as close as we can get (I believe), and we pretty much mess Him up, too, and use Him in ungodly ways (and there I go yet again!). I swiped it from Steph Drury's blog Get your adverbs here.

Unholy Sonnet 4

Amazing to believe that nothingness

Surrounds us with delight and lets us be,

And that the meekness of nonentity,

Despite the friction of the world of sense,

Despite the leveling of violence

Is all that matters. All the energy

We force into the matchhead and the city

Explodes inside a loving emptiness.

Not Dante’s rings, not the Zen zero’s mouth,

Out of which comes and into which light goes,

This God recedes from every metaphor,

Turns the hardest data into untruth,

And fills all blanks with blankness. This love shows

Itself in absence, which the stars adore. 

 

—Mark Jarman

The Enigma We Answer by Living

Einstein didn't speak as a child
waiting till a sentence formed and
emerged full-blown from his head.

I do the thing, he later wrote, which
nature drives me to do. Does a fish
know the water in which he swims?

This came up in conversation
with a man I met by chance,
friend of a friend of a friend,

who passed through town carrying
three specimen boxes of insects
he'd collected in the Grand Canyon

one for mosquitoes, one for honeybees,
one for butterflies and skippers,
each lined up in a row, pinned and labeled,

tiny morphologic differences
revealing how adaptation
happened over time. The deeper down

he hiked, the older the rock
and the younger
the strategy for living in that place.

And in my dining room the universe
found its way into this man
bent on cataloguing each innovation,

though he knows it will all disappear
the labels, the skippers, the canyon.
We agreed then, the old friends and the new,

that it's wrong to think people are a thing apart
from the whole, as if we'd sprung
from an idea out in space, rather than emerging

from the sequenced larval mess of creation
that binds us with the others,
all playing the endgame of a beautiful planet

that's made us want to name
each thing and try to tell
its story against the vanishing.

-- Alison Hawthorne Deming in Genius Loci: