Crows (II)

The crows tell me the body is there.
It is hidden by the lower brush and grasses, but
I know.

There is a carcass there. I can tell
that some unseen thing has sent the crows protesting
to upper branches.
I believe

their indignancy, as they dive
and swoop, creating a racket
they intend as menacing and fierce.

How dare the intruder take
what is rightfully theirs - -
this body
still warm, recently abandoned

by what was there,
what once was hidden but now is gone.
But the crows, they know.

Leaving Campus Crusade

I hate meeting strangers and striking up conversations and I hate asking for money. Not a good combination for a Campus Crusade for Christ staffer but there I was - - a missionary to college students I didn’t know and a fund raiser for the cause. Both aspects led to a break between me and CCC.

These days, though, when I look back, I see a much more telling episode that says a lot about who I was then, why I left and who I am now. It was a Spring day at Rutgers on one of the wide open lawns where students hung out on nice days. I ran into a female student lying on the grass studying. I approached her and was amazed that she welcomed me and asked me to sit down.

I went through the niceties - - you know, be friendly so you can get to the real goal: sharing God’s love. But as I started to share the Four Laws and explain God’s plan she started to tell me her beliefs. I was amazed. So much so that I later went back to my apartment and told my CCC roommates what a bizarre person I had met. I told them how genuinely crazy she was and couldn’t understand how someone like her could even be in college.

Here’s what she told me. She believed in an ancient Egyptian religion that worshipped frogs. I thought she couldn’t possibly be serious but she was so earnest. She seemed to have really thought this out. These days, I don’t remember the details but it was something like frogs were the symbol of change and flexibility. As amphibians they lived in two worlds and served as a guide for us. She believed that God was essentially amphibian in nature. Her religion included baptism, of course, water being all important.

Since she was serious and since I wanted to enter into a dialogue that I could direct to the Christian God, I asked her questions about afterlife, and prayer and communion. She had answers to it all. She was completely unpersuaded that there was anything about Christianity that had anything to offer over her own beliefs.

This is what I reported back to my friends, shaking my head in amazement that there were wackos out there like her.

These days, of course, I now realize she was playing me. I was so serious about my proselytizing that she decided, why fight it; she would just make up something just as ridiculous. She must have been amazed at how gullible I was. I wonder what she told her friends when she went home.

Now I think, what difference really is there between a person who believes in a celestial frog or the one who believes in an anthropomorphic one? Why is one any better of an explanation than the other?

I Had A Teacher

Caught in the middle,
caught in the view,
our perspective is limited.
Billions of galaxies above,
each with billions of stars within,
are apprehended by minds
freshly emerged,
fueled by stardust.




I had a teacher, Mrs. Wimer, for 1st and 2nd grade who was missing her lower right forearm. In spite of this she taught two grades at once in a one-room school house. She was teacher, principal, cafeteria staff and maintenance crew all in one. She kept the coal stove in the center of the room stoked in the winter, played fly-to-the-moon with us on our imaginary rocket (an old log) in the playground and made school work papers by some sort of primitive "copier" that consisted of hard gel in a cake pan inked with a roller and covered with a typed stencil.

I don’t remember much of the formal lessons Mrs. Wimer taught but I remember her taking us to do rubbings from the tombstones in the cemetery that bordered the school yard and wondering, “Just how old are these graves, anyway? How long ago, exactly, was the Revolution?” I remember collecting elderberries from which we squeezed juice to create a red ink to use with a quill and wondering, “If this comes from berries, where does blue ink come from?” I remember crushing sandstones and sifting the result through a screen and wondering, “Is the difference between rock and earth really just size? How small can a rock get before it’s no longer rock?”

I regularly think how grateful I am that I was taught to read but I am grateful, too, for having been taught to observe, experiment and wonder.

The Dust of Our Sorrow

The cedar waxwing lit on the hard packed earth under the bayberry bush. It seemed at first that it was the bird’s wing beat that had stirred the dust. The fine powder rose in a puff and slowly rearranged itself along the edges of the dried leaves and around the lichens and mosses but the dust did not rest. It skittered. It shifted. The grains moved. Gaining strength and sentience from an imperceptible vibration, it collected in folds and crevices and then, reaching a tipping point, poured over an edge or down a channel, forming anthill-like mounds and tiny screes. The gathering had begun again. When the dust began to drift around its feet the waxwing took flight, its reflection caught in the river Styx below.

*
There had always been an order and procession to my daily routines. Now those routines were subjected to the overbearance of a pending decision. Its demands had been growing so that it now soaked into my every task and thought. It created an imperceptible vibration, a hum filling all the silent spaces. It demanded resolution. And so, I decided. The vibration resolved to clarity.

Or so it seemed. Powdery small grains of my sanity began to slough away.

*
The waxwing stretched its wings and expanded its breast, flanks and belly, causing each pinion and down feather to stand erect and separate, letting the cool breeze cleanse the flesh underneath. As the bird settled on its perch, the breeze moved on. It created eddies in the powder below. As the wind began to gather momentum, it spun the dust into a vortex. Within that funnel an androgenous shape took form. Charon’s reincarnation had begun. The grains of dust fed him /she inhaled the winds from the other world.

*
For a while I was able to maintain objectivity. I knew I was hovering, obsessing. I could see his amusement in my constant ministrations. I could hear his thoughts: “Okay. Okay, okay. Chill out. What a drama queen!” But even objectivity and rationality eventually slipped. A turbulent vortex was sucking me in, even as I lay there with him, dreaming of making our escape.

*
Tilting its masked face, the waxwing peered at the bayberry, first from the side and then from above. Its tufted head bobbed and sought the best angle at which to snatch the prize. It almost considered too long. The upheaval as Charon arose flushed all the birds in a cacophonous flurry. It was mere instinct that made the Waxwing grab the fruit in the midst of flight but it was fright that loosened its grasp, causing the berry fall. Strengthened by more and more gathering fragments, Charon looked up and began to chant. He tested the rhythm of his stroke to the beat of his heart.

*
I stared up at the sun. It radiated its intense energy from a deep core of pent up power. It had an ominous heart of beating anger. It was indiscriminating in the release of that anger. It was fusion and flare bursting forth. In my head it sounded like a thousand screaming birds.

“It’s coming. It’s coming.” It was unhinging me. More and more fragments of my mind were flying off in the fray. Thoughts were lost and resolve failed. Resignation took its place.

I began to sing, “Everything they whispered in our ear is coming true. You are mostly gone. I am staying right beside you. I will follow you down. I am here right beside you.”

*
The muddy river bank was impressed with the trident markings of the waxwing’s feet as the bird hopped from spot to spot in search of trampled seeds. The few bits of dust that fell as Charon moved to the boat went unnoticed but the cat padding along behind was not disregarded. The bird moved to a near-by branch. Charon picked up the tune from the other world and sang to the cat in her lap telling him of his beauty. She levered the oars against the current.

*
I had reached out and grasped beauty that certainly must be eternal, only to find that it was my reaching that was eternal. He had been taken from me. Hadn’t my reach come up empty in the end? I drifted. My contemplation bobbed aimlessly as if in the wake of a slowly passing boat.

*
The wind blew from across the river, laden with a fine dust that caused the waxwing to close its eyes to slits. Its feathers were tugged and lifted by the gusts as the bird held on to its perch. As the dust dispersed with the wind, the bird shook off the last grains in a frenzied flutter. Folding her wings, she began to sing.

*
I began to sing. “And if a mama bird is seen folding her wings will you remember me?” I felt a deep ponderous sorrow resolving. It was not resolving to clarity, but to “amen.”