The Stream & the Sapphire

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by Denise Levertov

I have not plummetted.

  The Tide

  Where is the Giver to whom my gratitude

  rose? In this emptiness

  there seems no Presence.

  •

  How confidently the desires

  of God are spoken of!

  Perhaps God wants

  something quite different.

  Or nothing, nothing at all.

  •

  Blue smoke from small

  peaceable hearths ascending

  without resistance in luminous

  evening air.

  Or eager mornings—waking

  as if to a song’s call.

  Easily I can conjure

  a myriad images

  of faith.

  Remote. They pass

  as I turn a page.

  •

  Outlying houses, and the train’s rhythm

  slows, there’s a signal box,

  people are taking their luggage

  down from the racks.

  Then you wake and discover

  you have not left

  to begin the journey.

  •

  Faith’s a tide, it seems, ebbs and flows responsive

  to action and inaction.

  Remain in stasis, blown sand

  stings your face, anemones

  shrivel in rock pools no wave renews.

  Clean the littered beach, clear

  the lines of a forming poem,

  the waters flood inward.

  Dull stones again fulfill

  their glowing destinies, and emptiness

  is a cup, and holds

  the ocean.

  ‘In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being’

  Birds afloat in air’s current,

  sacred breath? No, not breath of God,

  it seems, but God

  the air enveloping the whole

  globe of being.

  It’s we who breathe, in, out, in, the sacred,

  leaves astir, our wings

  rising, ruffled — but only the saints

  take flight. We cower

  in cliff-crevice or edge out gingerly

  on branches close to the nest. The wind

  marks the passage of holy ones riding

  that ocean of air. Slowly their wake

  reaches us, rocks us.

  But storm or still,

  numb or poised in attention,

  we inhale, exhale, inhale,

  encompassed, encompassed.

  The Beginning of Wisdom

  Proverbs 9.—10

  You have brought me so far.

  •

  I know so much. Names, verbs, images. My mind

  overflows, a drawer that can’t close.

  •

  Unscathed among the tortured. Ignorant parchment

  uninscribed, light strokes only, where a scribe

  tried out a pen.

  •

  I am so small, a speck of dust

  moving across the huge world. The world

  a speck of dust in the universe.

  •

  Are you holding

  the universe? You hold

  onto my smallness. How do you grasp it,

  how does it not

  slip away?

  •

  I know so little.

  •

  You have brought me so far.

  Altars

  1

  Again before your altar, silent Lord.

  And here the sound of rushing waters,

  a dove’s crooning.

  Not every temple serves

  as your resting-place.

  Here, though, today,

  over the river’s continuo,

  under the dove’s soliloquy,

  your hospitable silence.

  2

  Again before thy altar, silent Lord.

  Thy presence is made known

  by untraced interventions

  like those legendary baskets filled

  with bread and wine, discovered

  at the door by someone at wit’s end

  returning home empty-handed

  after a day of looking for work.

  To Live in the Mercy of God

  To lie back under the tallest

  oldest trees. How far the stems

  rise, rise

  before ribs of shelter

  open!

  To live in the mercy of God. The complete

  sentence too adequate, has no give.

  Awe, not comfort. Stone, elbows of

  stony wood beneath lenient

  moss bed.

  And awe suddenly

  passing beyond itself. Becomes

  a form of comfort.

  Becomes the steady

  air you glide on, arms

  stretched like the wings of flying foxes.

  To hear the multiple silence

  of trees, the rainy

  forest depths of their listening.

  To float, upheld,

  as salt water

  would hold you,

  once you dared.

  •

  To live in the mercy of God.

  To feel vibrate the enraptured

  waterfall flinging itself

  unabating down and down

  to clenched fists of rock.

  Swiftness of plunge,

  hour after year after century,

  O or Ah

  uninterrupted, voice

  many-stranded.

  To breathe

  spray. The smoke of it.

  Arcs

  of steelwhite foam, glissades

  of fugitive jade barely perceptible. Such passion—

  rage or joy?

  Thus, not mild, not temperate,

  God’s love for the world. Vast

  flood of mercy

  flung on resistance.

  Primary Wonder

  Days pass when I forget the mystery.

  Problems insoluble and problems offering

  their own ignored solutions

  jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber

  along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing

  their colored clothes; cap and bells.

  And then

  once more the quiet mystery

  is present to me, the throng’s clamor

  recedes: the mystery

  that there is anything, anything at all,

  let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,

  rather than void: and that, O Lord,

  Creator, Hallowed One, You still,

  hour by hour sustain it.

  PART TWO

  Believers

  Poetics of Faith

  ‘Straight to the point’

  can ricochet,

  unconvincing.

  Circumlocution, analogy.

  parable’s ambiguities, provide

  context, stepping-stones.

  Most of the time. And then

  the lightning power

  amidst these indirections,

  of plain

  unheralded miracle!

  For example,

  as if forgetting

  to prepare them, He simply

  walks on water

  toward them, casually—

  and impetuous Peter, empowered,

  jumps from the boat and rushes

  on wave-tip to meet Him—

  a few steps, anyway—

  (till it occurs to him,

  ‘I can’t, this is preposterous’

  and Jesus has to grab him,

  tumble his weight

  back over the gunwale).

  Sustaining those light and swift

  steps was more than Peter

  could manage. Still,

  years later,

  his toes and insteps, just before sleep,

  would remember their passage.

  St. Peter and the Angel

  Delivered out of raw continual pain,
<
br />   smell of darkness, groans of those others

  to whom he was chained—

  unchained, and led

  past the sleepers,

  door after door silently opening—

  out!

  And along a long street’s

  majestic emptiness under the moon:

  one hand on the angel’s shoulder, one

  feeling the air before him,

  eyes open but fixed …

  And not till he saw the angel had left him,

  alone and free to resume

  the ecstatic, dangerous, wearisome roads of

  what he had still to do,

  not till then did he recognize

  this was no dream. More frightening

  than arrest, than being chained to his warders:

  he could hear his own footsteps suddenly.

  Had the angel’s feet

  made any sound? He could not recall.

  No one had missed him, no one was in pursuit.

  He himself must be

  the key, now, to the next door,

  the next terrors of freedom and joy.

  Caedmon

  All others talked as if

  talk were a dance.

  Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet

  would break the gliding ring.

  Early I learned to

  hunch myself

  close by the door:

  then when the talk began

  I’d wipe my

  mouth and wend

  unnoticed back to the barn

  to be with the warm beasts,

  dumb among body sounds

  of the simple ones.

  I’d see by a twist

  of lit rush the motes

  of gold moving

  from shadow to shadow

  slow in the wake

  of deep untroubled sighs.

  The cows

  munched or stirred or were still. I

  was at home and lonely,

  both in good measure. Until

  the sudden angel affrighted me—light effacing

  my feeble beam,

  a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:

  but the cows as before

  were calm, and nothing was burning,

  nothing but I, as that hand of fire

  touched my lips and scorched my tongue

  and pulled my voice

  into the ring of the dance.

  The Servant-Girl at Emmaus (A Painting by Velázquez)

  She listens, listens, holding

  her breath. Surely that voice

  is his—the one

  who had looked at her, once, across the crowd,

  as no one ever had looked?

  Had seen her? Had spoken as if to her?

  Surely those hands were his,

  taking the platter of bread from hers just now?

  Hands he’d laid on the dying and made them well?

  Surely that face—?

  The man they’d crucified for sedition and blasphemy.

  The man whose body disappeared from its tomb.

  The man it was rumored now some women had seen this

  morning, alive?

  Those who had brought this stranger home to their table

  don’t recognize yet with whom they sit.

  But she in the kitchen, absently touching

  the winejug she’s to take in,

  a young Black servant intently listening,

  swings round and sees

  the light around him

  and is sure.

  Conversion of Brother Lawrence

  ‘Let us enter into ourselves,

  Time presses.

  Brother Lawrence 1611—1691

  1

  What leafless tree plunging

  into what pent sky was it

  convinced you Spring, bound to return

  in all its unlikelihood, was a word

  of God, a Divine message?

  Custom, natural reason, are everyone’s assurance;

  we take the daylight for granted, the moon,

  the measured tides. A particular tree, though,

  one day in your eighteenth winter,

  said more, an oracle. Clumsy footman,

  apt to drop the ornate objects handed to you,

  cursed and cuffed by butlers and grooms,

  your inner life unsuspected,

  you heard, that day, a more-than-green

  voice from the stripped branches.

  Wooden lace, a celestial geometry, uttered

  more than familiar rhythms of growth.

  It said By the Grace of God.

  Midsummer rustled around you that wintry moment.

  Was it elm, ash, poplar, a fruit-tree, your rooted

  twig-winged angel of annunciation?

  2

  Out from the chateau park it sent you

  (by some back lane, no doubt,

  not through the wide gates of curled iron),

  by ways untold, by soldier’s marches, to the obscure

  clatter and heat of a monastery kitchen,

  a broom’s rhythmic whisper for music,

  your torment the drudgery of household ledgers. Destiny

  without visible glory. ‘Time pressed.’ Among pots and pans, heart-still through the bustle of chores,

  your labors, hard as the pain in your lame leg,

  grew slowly easier over the years, the years

  when, though your soul felt darkened, heavy, worthless,

  yet God, you discovered, never abandoned you but walked

  at your side keeping pace as comrades had

  on the long hard roads of war. You entered then

  the unending ‘silent secret conversation,’

  the life of steadfast attention.

  Not work transformed you; work, even drudgery,

  was transformed: that discourse

  pierced through its monotones, infused them

  with streams of sparkling color.

  What needed doing, you did; journeyed if need be

  on rocking boats, lame though you were,

  to the vineyard country to purchase the year’s wine

  for a hundred Brothers, laughably rolling yourself

  over the deck-stacked barrels when you couldn’t

  keep your footing; and managed deals with the vintners

  to your own surprise, though business was nothing to you.

  Your secret was not the craftsman’s delight in process,

  which doesn’t distinguish work from pleasure—

  your way was not to exalt nor avoid

  the Adamic legacy, you simply made it irrelevant:

  everything faded, thinned to nothing, beside

  the light which bathed and warmed, the Presence

  your being had opened to. Where it shone,

  there life was, and abundantly; it touched

  your dullest task, and the task was easy.

  Joyful, absorbed,

  you ‘practiced the presence of God’ as a musician

  practices hour after hour his art:

  ‘A stone before the carver,’

  you ‘entered into yourself.’

  Dom Helder Camara at the’ Nuclear Test Site

  Dom Helder, octogenarian wisp

  of human substance arrived from Brazil,

  raises his arms and gazes toward

  a sky pallid with heat, to implore

  ‘Peace!’

  —then waves a ‘goodbye for now’

  to God, as to a compadre.

  ‘The Mass is over, go in peace

  to love and serve the Lord’: he walks

  down with the rest of us to cross

  the cattle-grid, entering forbidden ground

  where marshals wait with their handcuffs.

  After hours of waiting,

  penned into two wire-fenced enclosures, sun

  climbing to cloudless zenith, till everyone

  has been
processed, booked, released to trudge

  one by one up the slope to the boundary line

  back to a freedom that’s not so free,

  we are all reassembled. We form

  two circles, one contained in the other, to dance

  clockwise and counterclockwise

  like children in Duncan’s vision.

  But not to the song of ashes, of falling:

  we dance in the unity that brought us here,

  instinct pulls us into the ancient

  rotation, symbol of continuance.

  Light and persistent as tumbleweed,

  but not adrift, Dom Helder, too,

  faithful pilgrim, dances,

  dances at the turning core.

  The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich, 1342–1416

  1

  Julian, there are vast gaps we call black holes,

  unable to picture what’s both dense and vacant;

  and there’s the dizzying multiplication of all

  language can name or fail to name, unutterable

  swarming of molecules. All Pascal

  imagined he could not stretch his mind to imagine

  is known to exceed his dread.

  And there’s the earth of our daily history,

  its memories, its present filled with the grain

  of one particular scrap of carpentered wood we happen

  to be next to, its waking light on one especial leaf,

  this word or that, a tune in this key not another,

  beat of our hearts now, good or bad,

  dying or being born, eroded, vanishing—

  And you ask us to turn our gaze

  inside Out, and see

  a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, and believe

  it is our world? Ask us to see it lying

  in God’s pierced palm? That it encompasses

  every awareness our minds contain? All Time?

  All limitless space given form in this

  medieval enigma?

  Yes, this is indeed

  what you ask, sharing

  the mystery you were shown: all that is made:

  a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, held safe

  in God’s pierced palm.

  2

  What she petitioned for was never

  instead of something else.

  Thirty was older than it is now. She had not married

  but was no starveling; if she had loved,

  she had been loved. Death or some other destiny

  bore him away, death or some other bride

  changed him. Whatever that story,

  long since she had travelled

  through and beyond it. Somehow,

  reading or read to, she’d spiralled

 

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