Let us move beyond
The harsh light of theology

Let us live beyond
The eternal devastation of sin

Let us rest beyond
The ceaseless demands of religion

Let us believe beyond
The certainty of knowledge

Let us love beyond
The ugliness of indifference

Let us see beyond
The darkness of now

Queen of the Underworld
Dark mother of my soul

Protect me from the hard glare
Of the overlord of this world

Grant me night vision
To see your soft blessings

I fear heaven
“We shall not all die
But we shall all be changed”
We are promised

Happy always…No sin
Blissful always…No troubles
Joyous always…No disappointments
Peaceful always…No vexations

Wait…no vexations?
You mean to tell me
I won’t worry any more?
No more strategizing how 
To help my husband maneuver stairs
With his bad knee
No more holding Carol, helpless
As she cries for her dying ex-husband
No more catching the doctor’s eye
To shake my head as her patient
My mom
Exaggerates a minor problem
Then catch myself and wonder
Why do I think I have to correct
When she has been my mother’s doctor
For more than 20 years

No more of my daily concerns
No more grocery shopping
And coming home to realize
I went out for 3 things
Came home with 12
And forgot one of the 3 things
I went for

Just happiness and bliss
Joy and peace

I am sure some entity
Divine no doubt
Will be eternally happy there

I am also sure it will not be
Anything resembling this me
That I hold on to
Perhaps too closely

If eternity
were but endless time
how frightening
how unattractive
how pointless
it would be

If eternity
were always now
how boring
how stagnant
how wretched 
it would be

How how how
can mind grasp
or spirit crave

Time that does not move
Now that does not stagnate

When I have no more tomorrows
Will I remember all my yesterdays?

Marijuana can help
But is by no means a sure thing

Alcohol is useless
At least for this purpose

Prayer is performative
And muddies the waters

Friends are sometimes
But often better for laughter
Or tears

Love-making is brilliant
Too brilliant perhaps for clarity

Poetry is helpful
And sometimes lights the path

Oh how I wish I could write
Of meditation
Contemplation
Reading the mystics
Even walking through a woods
Or a field
Wading a stream
Watching deer or birds
Or even our dog

Oh how I wish my world would come clear
In grand and glorious style
The wonder of many
The envy of all

But I just sit quietly on the sofa
Beside my husband
Usually, he works a jigsaw puzzle
On his i-pad
Sometimes he draws
Or listens to a podcast 
About woodworking
Landscaping
Trees
Or the environmental crisis

He always sits on my right
So that his good left ear
Is between him and me
But we don’t talk much

I read, or listen to a podcast
Or dabble in acrylics
With children’s paints
On my lap
Deliberately resisting the impulse
To buy proper artist tools
I let myself play with colors
On small canvases
With brushes and knives
Steel wool and cotton balls
Toothbrush and cotton swap

The canvas may get confused
But the world comes clear

My knees bend
Almost as much as ever
And ache very little

My bedroom becomes a poetry hide-out
Muting Mom’s
Ever louder TV

And then there is that small gummy
With its even smaller quantity of THC

I don’t like intercessory prayer
But I have at times asked God for favors

Please let my husband live
Please let my daughter’s twins live
Please ease Betty’s dementia
Please let marijuana be legal by the time I retire

Wouldn’t you know
It was that last one
The Sovereign God of All Eternity
Chose to answer OK.

((h/t Amy Schumer’s Gratitude sketch https://youtu.be/l5dTdaKdGG8)

Thank You God for Most This Amazing
poem by e. e. cummings

I don’t want to write, inspired by it,
But rather to read it again and again
Until I sink, completely, irretrievably, into
The quicksand of thanksgiving

I want to smother in thanksgiving
Forcing the air of trite, culturally now gratitude
Out of my reluctant lungs

Smother until I am forced to breathe in
The gritty moist sand of thanksgiving
The sand that drowns my lungs
Forcing out the last molecules 
Of easy gratitude

I almost kill myself
Reaching reaching
For the unattainable
Illusory total gratitude
Even as I sink further into
This quicksand reality
Leaving above facile gratitude
Drowning in thankfulness

Though there be no bottom
No slide down into a starlit
Infinity of universes
To then whoosh through
With all the skill of current CGI

I will live
I will learn to breathe in
Tearingly gritty, tearfully moist
Thanksgiving

“The substance of things hoped for”
As the garden sleeps
with tender plants surrounded
by piles of mulch
He plants the bulbs
that will bloom in the spring

“The evidence of things unseen”
Long after the flowers wither
under early summer’s sun
the tall slender leaves
of daffodil, iris, hyacinth and tulip
bear evidence
of next year’s flowers

Poetry,
I often try to think,
Is a felicitous marriage
Of perception and thought
For better or worse
For richer or poorer
And not even parted by death

Because
Capital T, Capital H, Capital E
Soul
THE soul
Not yours mine or ours
Not even gods or goddesses
Just THE
(please, in your mind, always see THE capitalized)
THE soul of everything
Infinity in a grain of sand, to borrow shamelessly
From one of those old dead white men
Who were assumed for generations to be the only ones
Able to express THE (all caps, remember) soul

THE soul is so very different from a soul
And yet, of course, a single soul is 
Every bit as much
THE total soul as 
THE total soul is each single soul
Which bring us squarely into the realm of 
Quantum physics

Next stop, surely, is the illusion of linear time
But the individual soul animating these fingers
Feels the need to stop words and rest
Quiet
Secure
In awareness of THE (all CAPS, remember) soul.

The poetry prompt “What words of love surround you”
Leads me quickly and inevitably
(unlike John I love the unfashionable adverb)
To “Words of love
Soft and tender
Won’t get you where you want to go”

And soon I am not writing poetry
But dancing in the streets
With the Mamas and the Papas

Even though Christine McVie
(she of Fleetwood Mac,
Not Mamas and Papas)
Died yesterday

Sadly and inevitably
Dead
To dance no more on this earth
Except with worms, maggots and other bugs
Until she dances again as a blade of grass
Or a tree root or just rich dark loamacious earth

Impossible that Christine would want 
A dirge: dance-free, song-less
No, not that, but
Perhaps a second line
With colorful umbrellas
Jazz dancing down the street
Behind the brass band

Memories of music
Merge and twist together
As though choreographed 
By Chubby Checkers

Wrap me warm
Bless my rhythm
As my now old body
Continues to dance