08-16-2018, 03:05 AM
A Young Priest
A child can fall in love,
it doesn't take long,
I believe, and
my first impressions are best
no matter my doubts and challenge.
From childhood on,
one needn't even learn
to cling to what is special.
We are of one darkness
only you light up sometimes
like a lightning bug,
and I swim, unwet, on the earth-fields
dreaming, like a dance, of light.
I don't understand anything;
everything is so strange to me.
And you retain so little
of all the things you've conquered:
maybe it's by rote you learn to love.
There is imagination to love;
not to say that there is no God,
a personal narrative, a dreaming cover
or crust that seeps into the blood
like rusty pipes into water
we drink, and live happily on,
as insects on a rotting tree that still survives;
who wants to live without love
that could?—Rather tell a lie
and live it. Even lying breath sustains.
How long baptized we drown
in one word:
Love crowding all malice from my heart,
as it hardly suffocates my lines,
yet my song is jealous.
Why is love always in someone else's cabinet,
locked away, as in a foreign country?
Why do girls dream of princes or ordinary men
but never madness, love's own origin?
Is it too close to home, or far afield.
God is love, because we love him.
We believe because we love.
If true, and some fallacy, pathetic
because unsettling, anchors faith
in both heart and loins,
or all in mind,
overheated by a sensual heat I trust,
what is man but drunkenness and lust,
and what I cannot see or feel
reserved for death.
Or is there a grandfather clock in hell,
an invisible secondhand counting sins
like hairs on our head until,
bald as a monk,
we enter heaven alone.
If not fit to ask these questions,
I simply don't mark them such.
Speak to you, your mortal spirit,
only faithful in this sense
. . . I love you with my faith.
Distant companion, only ignorant because
I am weak;
only in my dreams, where I find my God,
are you alone like me.
This world is yours, to live, and love, and be happy;
you earn it through a grace I can never hold
or understand.
Our Lord wept for such beauty.