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…that this is, even as its name roughly suggests, something of a musical and thematic bookend to the Western tradition since the Renaissance:

(though my more musically precise friends can feel free to correct me)

Stuck Right Here

…and liked it. I’m very grateful! This was awarded the Kent Keeth Poetry Prize (a student literature contest award) at the 2009 Beall Poetry Festival at Baylor University:

Disclosure

If someone should speak Peace it will not be
	The silencing of voices all resolved,
		in pacification,
	Nor the pacific strain—stout Cortez or Balboa to the side,
		see the scene
	Of conflict, wide and warm, like blood, and salty—
It will not be with pax
	Or pace—non requiescat, lest we lie
	To rest, in cooling stillness, like the tomb—
Such pieces from the pavement form the stones
	We throw, the gore we touch, the road to
		all for your own good
		and we mean well—
	No,
If someone should speak peace, the word will be
	Some word I’ve left unspoken, unforeseen, foretold
		a revelation.

Hard to argue with this, really:

If, robbed of two fond old enormities,
Our being had no onward auguries,
What then were this great love of ours to say
For launching other lives to voyage again
A little farther into time and pain,
A little faster in a futile chase
For a kingdom and a power and a Race
That would have still in sight
A manifest end of ashes and eternal night?
Is this the music of the toys we shake
So loud,—as if there might be no mistake
Somewhere in our indomitable will?
Are we no greater than the noise we make
Along one blind atomic pilgrimage
Whereon by crass chance billeted we go
Because our brains and bones and cartilage
Will have it so?
If this we say, then let us all be still
About our share in it, and live and die
More quietly thereby.

(E. A. Robinson, “The Man Against the Sky“)

…and, of course, for the title reference, take a Journey to the music video world.

I believe that Jesus Christ, whose dead body was entombed, sealed, placed under guard, and left undisturbed until the morning after the Sabbath (on the third day in which he had been dead), did not remain dead. Like those whom Christ and the prophets had called back from death throughout Biblical history, Jesus rose from the dead: the normal biological function of the body to which His mother had given birth began again, despite the fatal wounds whose marks were still plain on his body. Unlike those whom Christ and the prophets had called back from the dead, however, Christ not only came back to bodily life but has been transformed (as all Christ’s people one day will be), so that His body is now insusceptible of death from natural or violent causes, and bears without mortal flaw the image of God.

My sanity is borne on rivers,
meandering;
yet rivers know their course,
an end predestined,
not assured,
or not predestined but assured;
and yet in cities they are still, the same.
Four rivers, then; four that define
the cities where I loved them; for I know
I may be smoothed and worn, but I am coarse
like the stubble that scratches where I kiss,
and wakes the baby.

I

The first is Graytown, call it Dixon, home: the Rock; my namesake,
where I grew, a tribute to the old frontier, a ferry town, downtown
a treasure trove where library, and toys, and park were found—
the ground divided by the trains, the viaducts,
cut stone, old money, and the work gone elsewhere:
the trains cut past the river, and the trestle
(standing still, between downriver and the dam,
and parallel two bridges that connect
the bustle and the hassle of downtown)
inspired dreams and horror, like the quarry
every year some swam through, dived and drowned.
The dam, too, drew some fools to glory and disaster,
in canoes; I fished with dad, or restlessly
skipped stones to drive the fish away, impatient
for their biting, though mosquitoes
found dinner soon enough; and later, fireworks,
photography on riverbanks, a steady hand
required and found at last, though better film
had left a better picture; and poems, sitting, walking,
thinking with the churn
whose soundless noise, the sheer pent foaming force,
seemed symbol of itself enough for me; seen steaming from the pool
where last I battled asthma, living low
like catfish on the bottom.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Ferry

I kneel and bow and pray you come with me,
And we will dance beneath these scattered lights,
Concealed for days by dawn’s diviner rites,
Until each night unseals our wait and see.
Dance with me as I ask on bended knee:
Awash in ocean’s orchestrated nights,
Afloat in inky blackness that indicts
Another reason, no, another plea.
You must remember, we are parasites
Until we pray or prey, receiving all
We take for given, or mistaken call
Our contributions to these passing sights.
Some thing eternal feeds us, and we thrive,
Rejoicing through this passage none survive.

PGE 6-27-2008