Three Poems for August

Love for the Living

"Dark and light, bad and good, are not different but one and the same."
-Heraclitus

God commanded the light into being and the shadows came.
Creatures came to inhabit the shadows and began to draw blood.

When we sons and daughters sat on the immense skin of the Earth,
with its eczemas and cancers showing, and tried to make sense of bad,

the universe spun a womb and closed itself inside.
All the sun-lit blood runs inside it. All the broken hearts beat here.

When one of us sits on the immense skin of the Earth and tries
to make sense of bad, you remember them from the very beginning.

**********

Two Faces

after a photograph of a man cleaning a statue of Christ in Bilbao, Ecuador.

The young man’s eyes droop with tolerance,
like he’s washing his baby brother, a family chore.
He twists a gray rag into the Christ’s eye,
removing the motes of ash from its white
painted face which shows the wounds up well.

Tungurahua volcano will erupt soon.
It darkens the land with a plague of ash.

The is now the Christ whose feet were washed
and the one who felt his father forsake him.
The eyes are round with thorny lashes.
They stare far off, not aware of being cleaned,
but only of the fiery eye of God and the One loneliness.

**********

Determinism: a Thought Experiment

Imagine, if you will, a tunnel you run through
blind folded, dancing as you go. It was built decades ago.
You never feel even a finger brush the walls.
When you turn around and take the blindfold off,
the tunnel’s shape is a silhouette of you
running, dancing–a three dimensional, hollowed
out, time-lapse cameo of you, wider by a hair.
You squeeze your way back to the tunnel’s mouth.
You have to pry your feet loose when they wedge
themselves in the narrow troughs where you stand.
When you get back to the beginning, your skin
is pink and stinging from the scraping tunnel walls.
The world glistens with the dewy question marks
of free-will. And your skin grows back, of course.