The first time I told myself
that I didn’t care about you anymore
I took a cleaver to the connective tissue
of our friendship,
sundered every tenuous attachment
with such ruthlessness
the actions of a madwoman, grieving
Did I think no one would see who I was?
Who I am?
Or was I afraid because you did see,
so certain of rejection
that I broke everything first
before you could break me
before I could be broken?
The trouble with wanting is I want you
but you are a mystery
beyond my comprehending,
summons of sweet-scented blooms
the bumblebee may never see nor taste.
Blindly I follow after crumbs
thoughtless cast upon the ground before me
poor proxies they are
for that in which my soul takes delights-
and so I blunder on,
and hope one day to spy
the humblest vision of that beyond knowing
to which my heart holds fast.
The house of this heart was a real fixer-upper.
A bona fide eyesore if you knew how to look.
Good bones, she had, but see?
Desuetude draped heavy on her,
shrouding windows, latching doors,
and in the darkness labored on,
devouring sinews undisturbed
’til only bones remained.
Can these bones live?
Within the shadow of this tomb
I scarcely dared to ask.
Once, in my ruined state,
I had caught a glimpse of
something living, perched on the lintel
and the warmth of that body so close,
thrumming with life
felt like resurrection.
But its living broke me more, somehow:
as I shuddered to life,
plumbing long silenced
surged and split, leaking everywhere
threatening what little was left.
What to do? I shut it off—
cut the main supply at the source
pulled the lever on my leveraged heart.
the rushing silence in that chamber
was deafening.
It was like the silence of the grave.
and some days,
I lift my eyes to the rafters
and drift
no more to give
no more to take
neither joy nor pain
within my barely beating breast
and I wonder:
is this how the pearl of sand feels,
as she grinds silently to nothing
on the shadowed sea floor?
These days, so often
I catch myself
in the world
but not of the world;
in the place of boundless possibility—
a liminal cloud of of unknowing—
in which the heart
is freed for her own choosing
circumscribed by nothing
save that in which her soul delights.
Expansive as the universe,
she radiates light.
There is so much I would tell you
if there were time, if you had time.
I would tell you how the trees are shedding their raiment,
their leaves scattered across the turf
like the cast offs of careless teenagers.
Or how, last night, my heart briefly swelled in my chest
as I pondered the overwhelming beauty of the world
alongside the inevitability of suffering
that is the birthright of the living,
as constant as the velvet darkness
that gathers herself around every solitary star.
I would tell you how you are to me:
a silent companion, kindly but distant, like a ghost,
and how I cannot pretend that you are here,
but also, how you are never fully gone.
But it is not possible to tell you these things;
the distance is too far;
I see through the mirror dimly, or not at all.
So instead I watch the steam curl off my neighbor’s roof
in the morning sun, straining for a glimpse
of that penumbral confluence where air and water merge into one.
I am not lonely; I am alone,
though you would likely never know
for all the sound and fury, chaos and light
that fills my days and chokes my nights.
I am not falling apart; I am many parts-
emotions and habits, experiences, art,
bandaged together by a fragile gravity
that I call my self (mystery though she may be).
I am not broken; I am breaking down
the distance between who I thought I needed to be
to be loved and accepted in this world we call home,
and the messy, lovely child of God that is laughing through tears within.
What is true in this moment
is that I am alive and
there is breath within my lungs,
this sweet air with its hint of sharper days
on a horizon as yet unseen.
What is true is that
this moment will not be the end of me.
It is is merely one in a series
that together make up the painful fact of living.
And though my heart is breaking,
and will likely break again, and again, and again,
it will also keep on beating,
feeling,
and even, in God’s good time,
healing.
A few years ago, someone gifted me a copy of a book by Kathleen Norris entitled “Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life.” I considered the tome for all of about 10 minutes before deciding that it had nothing helpful to teach me, after which I set the volume upon my bookshelf where it might begin its task of collecting dust.
How could I have imagined that, in the span of just a few years, I would find myself held in stasis by what Norris describes as a “restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair that plagues us today.” I can describe it only as the feeling of being, on the one hand, completely incapable of sitting still or of being alone with myself and my own thoughts, and on the other hand, feeling disturbingly incapacitated and utterly incapable of the fruitful endeavors that previously filled my time.
It has been such an unexpected and unwelcome turn of events that, strangely, I have felt compelled to write (and to write, and to write, and to write some more) about the perturbations that it has stirred up–driven to examine from every angle the ways in which this “scourge of the soul” affects me even as I have found myself nearly incapable of stringing together coherent, written observations for the worshipping community which I serve. Somehow, acedia has managed to simultaneously silence and unfetter my internal voice. It has caged the writer but unleashed the poet.
At first, I mocked my own drive to write more lyrically. I told anyone who might encounter my words that they were “deeply average” and “crappy poetry for beginners.” I think a part of me was (and perhaps still is) disappointed in myself. Whereas before I felt completely in control of my voice, now I experience my writing as deeply vulnerable, needy, and exposed. Because decent poetry resists the urge to explain itself, I have to let it speak on its own terms, and allow others to make their own connections. I have to be okay with the possibility that my own needs, wants, and desires will lay right on the surface, unhidden by fancy turns of phrase.
What has been fascinating is that poetry has in some ways been an antidote to acedia. It has forced me to pay attention to what I am really feeling, right now, right here. I have been made to confront the longings of my heart rather than escape them and to acknowledge the things within me that I am ashamed of, because they cannot be denied. They are a part of me too. Poetry has forced me, in other words, to care about myself. And while that is difficult, agonizing work, it is also deeply necessary, for it is care for the self that lifts us out of our despair, and back into life.
Deeper in me than I 