excerpt from "The Communion of Love," by St. Matthew the Poor

"Receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who observes his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like." (James 1:21-24)

One Memory of Love

She and her mother and father
can only know the fullness of your love
after you have completely removed it,
after you have left the increasing yawn of silence
enter the door of their house.

All with gentle grace, of course.

They know now of love and all it's ardor,
how cleanly it can sever the heart
of fragile daughters directly in two.

She, again she, the one who now
only exists in poems,
is only as whole as the hollow words
you crooned to her years ago,
when you were both naked
in the broken bed.

Do not worry. She will find some other
handsome fool and will try
to fit his words into
the old stamped outlines of yours.

The ones who are first will suffer
the deepest injuries,
they keep scars in the way
miserly men keep books of war,
and will be shuffled back
to the bottom of a dusty and worn out box.

Passing Through

East coast towns are swallowed
by the breath of the ocean
salted, grainy air.
These countless picture-sized
connecticut villages.

Nameless and of olde English sentiments
crumbling buildings at the rail tracks,
dark ale pubs, fish and chip shops,
lone houses scattered
in the bare thickets of thorny forests.

There is an emptiness
you can see. A vacancy that fills
the space between daylight and the trees,
the pavement and the pedestrians,
the open doorway of old brick houses.

The metal sheen of cars
glistening the sun
off in the distance.

Except from "The Problem of Pain," by C.S. Lewis

"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell. But God wills our good, and our good is to love HIm (with that responsive love proper to creatures) and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God--though it may be the nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain. Yet the call is not only to prostration and awe; it is to a reflection of the Divine life, a creaturely participation in the Divine attributes which is far beyond our present desires. We are bidden to 'put on Christ', to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little."

"A Bowl," by Rumi

Imagine the time the particle you are
returns where it came from!

The family darling comes home. Wine,
without being contained in cups,
is handed around.

A red glint appears in a granite outcrop,
and suddenly the whole cliff turns to ruby.

At dawn I walked along with a monk
on his way to the monastery.
"We do the same work,"
I told him. "We suffer the same."

He gave me a bowl.
And I saw:
the soul has this shape.
Shams,
you that teach us and actual sunlight,
help me now,

being in the middle of being partly in my self
and partly outside.