My Covenant with All That Is

I pledge to follow
The earth’s gentle curve
As I go;

I pledge to breathe only air as I am able;
I pledge to breathe often;

I pledge to eat of the earth;
Nothing other shall pass my lips.

I pledge to wend along the ways,
Trodding earth, never air,
Clouds and sun above,
What rocks are there under foot.

I pledge to see as best I can in bright sun;
I pledge to squint as I am able in dark;

I pledge to remain
Upright at times
When I am able;

To lie prone when the need arises.

I pledge to find flames hot;
To find snow cold;
To find water according to its fashion;

I pledge to love as best I can;
To hate sparingly;
To mock seldom;
To judge not;
To jump to few conclusions;
To subscribe to few illusions.

I pledge to be
As I am able
And to cease
As the rules require.

The Spreading Web

The spidering cracks
Shooting across
Hard clay pan
Webbing across
Silence and flax

The spreading cracks
Like roots
Like breaks

The spreading cracks
As in porcelain
Into tiny boxes
As glass into
Myriad fragments

The spidering cracks
Like laces of blood
Tying back
Tying out
Into its webs
To the first decibel

The spidering webs
Flesh in its chains
To back and to back
To side to side
Until all is one, is one

The spidering cracks
The spreading web
Into webs of webs
Spreading into
The shimmer of all
The tremble of everything

The spidering spread
Of web into web
Into ever
Into all
The encompass
Of all direction
The embrace of all continuous

Into flood
Of the sap popping
In fire
The rocks, paper, and scissors
Of consciousness

The cracks spreading
Until the paper
Rows in fire
Until the rocks
Sail to cloud
Until the steel
Scissors to the earth

The spidering cracks
Web, crack, and spider
Fly of the spark
Spark of the fly
Destruction of remover to remain

Birth of the builder
To build
Spreading cracks
The ink on air
Spreading webs
The words into fire
Spreading webs
The earth into earth
Water, the water
Spreading

Triolet on Piety

Does a confused premise
Make the devotion wrong?
Is love so easy to dismiss?

Does a confused premise
Silence a kitten's hiss
Or quiet a swan's song?

Does a confused premise
make the devotion wrong?

The Apophatic

Not ______
Not ______
Not ______

Add your blank
to the blankness

Add your all
to the everything

With What Knows Who (Genesis 32)

Happens after the night
Wrestling with the dark
With what knows who

Wrestling the place
Wrestling the time
Wrestling to matter

Wrestling until dawn
Calls shadow home
The light and the dark

That never fight about it
And sometime a sacred wound
Jacob to Israel

Displaced and un-named
One other into a thing
Happens after a night

Wrestling
With what knows who

The Word

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word.

In the beginning the Word was with God. All things came to be by God; and without God nothing came to be. In God was life; and life was the light of humanity. And the light shone in darkness; but the darkness did not grasp it.

Jesus was in the world, and the world came to being through him, yet the world did not know him. As many as received him, he gave them power to become the Children of God. These are born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of the human, but of God.


The Word became flesh and lived among us,
(And we have seen his glory,
The glory as of an only child,)
Full of grace and truth.

Liturgy and Meaning

“Music rots when it gets too far from the dance,”
said Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading,
“Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.“

And liturgy? Leitourgia, service to the people?
What of the rites performed for the people?

Too far from music? Too far from dance?
Atrophied, the poetry rootless,
wandered so far from music?

Music, movement, poetry,
The roots grown back
to the old, old rites,
to the tying we people again
back to cause, to the service.


“Cassandra, your eyes are like tigers,
with no word written in them
You also have I carried to nowhere

to an ill house and there is
no end to the journey”