My brother Chris has just launched his own poetry blog called Tapping the Wall. He’s got two new poems up, and I hope you’ll check them out. I’ve also added his site to my blogroll.

Chris is not a “Christian poet” in the sense that he rewrites ‘Tis So Sweet To Trust In Jesus over and over, or spins allegories about the cross. He is a Christian who is a poet — that is, who has taken up the calling to render all sorts of experience in rhythmic and sensual language. Far better.

Boys on hay bales for benches, gripping rails,
rocking with the wagon, squirming their rapture.
Antique tractor sputter eases the anxious quiet.

No prancing horse, no joking driver, no jolly group singing.
Parents rock with the wagon as if to sleep,
while boys spy out green tangled humps of orange.

Boys will run when the ride is over,
leaping down steps with arms raised high,
running strides that crunch the gravel.
They’ll fill cupped hands with cornmeal for the horse
(who’s hayride days are over) and tingle at his whiskered lips,
giggle at his rough tongue, listen when his half-fearing eyes speak.

Parents will linger on the rocks, kick them listlessly
near ignored play things, stare off at the barn when
conversations bow to the sovereignty of silence.
Silence over the farm, silence over the orchards.
Silence brought from the office in slit searching eyes
where silent is the manager and silent is the phone.

But boys will run and laugh all the more for lack of laughter.
Broken meal will spill over their fingers trailing to the aged beast,
for in the wagon their restless legs flex the impatience of love.

For Graham

What am I leaving him,
this kind-eyed boy with the golden crown?
Stone tree on a stone head?
Lifeless sanctity sheltering lifeless foundation?
From distance in struggle who can tell?
For that is not where we climb.

We rise from shrinking lake on aged paths
and search our footing a feet on scattered stones.
We lose the sky when bent and clutching
and stagger like forefathers on the angle.

The monkey-ed face of the lava-ed crest
glares across the canyon.
Too close to see threats of gaze,
we breach the chin and circle forehead.

His ancient mischief is a bliss
to picking and scratching through
hairless cracks in his stone boulder skull
till the top where we at last must forget
all ridicules for what we now behold.

And what am I to leave him,
my kind-eyed boy with the golden crown,
who pushes my lead and pulls my will:
Not a stone tree, but a tree from stone—

steady and single at the height,
in view of all yet blind to view—

whose bark a warmer gray than rock,
whose branches a cover of arms,
whose leaves a green over death.

It sprang from where soil settled
in the faults of hazard.

Pop-rock plays sedation when florescents buzz
and black phones swarm like angry bees
spinning aggression from hive instinct.
The office man yawns, the office girl grins
and pop rock plays a love song
none contend yet all believe.

But Bach plays loud a second world
once heard never again possible to ignore.
When a soul through a medium a hundred years old
breathes a pitch that vibrates the spheres
and builds the release of up looking down,
I see aggression like cars-silent objects moving-
and in the void I find that world
still marked and living.

Pop-rock chastises imagination
and straps with silk, black bands
the erotic pulse to the image bed-
get me home, get me laid,
get me money, I’ll be ok.
Pop-rock sings a sex dirge where
the stifled cubicle births a bored frustration.

But Bach plays loud above a-rhythmic freeway groans
and jerk and gun shifts of shiny metal hulls.
We close our eyes, we frantic speed.
We sensual blind, we dream of dead stopping.
Coffee back in paper cup, thought edged with sleep,
body within body, slave of slave,
I am ready to cut these weights
and fly.

Building sweetly is rarely heard,
so give me dissonance that punctures
the dream ahead we make when behind is blind.
Hardly ever we see fully into either,
and beauty is not completely born
yet of frailty something beautiful.

Arguers are never solved,
so give me agreers who disagree,
revelers and punchy diggers
who regard the soft under-belly of pose
as a mother regards her child’s will.
They gently abuse their armor to shreds
and fall tender at the tough tissue of heart.

Few things consist,
so let the contradictions praise the consistent.
The blind man cannot see,
so let him tell of colors hidden in night.
The deaf man cannot hear,
so let him describe the timbre’s subtle change of pain.
The mute man cannot speak,
so let him sign what we do not say.
The dead man cannot live
so let his dry bones moisten
at the rain brought him by the wind.

Jazz is the jagged edge,
so give me the beautiful cloth
because the cloth is whole.
The eyes below do not see as the Head above.
So when the Head is stated,
I never fear the abstractions.
I already know the truth.

I stepped out to night of little distinction,
color a nuance, shape a shade.
A point of orange raging then still
shows Ron smoking and his garage, I guess, open.
An inclination of dark against luminescent stucco
must be Madeline’s hair sliding over the baby.

Sound steps in the grass. I jerk to my right.
Moving in pixilated dim, a faint white smear.
You out too? You out too?
I believe we’re neighbors by commonality’s cold comfort.
The white smear leaves.
I’m alone on a dead road.

Back inside children clutch their toys
and wide-eyed guide the beam.
Midwives of the elemental,
they search wavering corners
for ghosts I’ve grown used.

I end to a world tilted off.
Every sitting now is how do I sit?
Every standing now is how do I stand?
But joints can neither find comfort nor return
where memory loses the force of habit.

I pray to pollutions like bottled little christs:
please dissolve to block the bent structures of body-
faith in alchemy through water and acid.

But pain is not the devil’s servant.
I swallow and yet it scrapes the vision of my proud pleasure.
Pain is the finger of rebuke. Pain is the grip of love.

I started on starched-white sheets
and waited for the healing to come.
The healing came and the pain did not go,
both.

I ended to a world tilted off,
not able anymore to accommodate its slouch.
I stand at a slant, my hip pinches me straight.
I sit at a slump, my leg pains me walk.
I walk head down passing the hidden
in cowering formation of chemical ignoring
while numbness spreads from the crimp in my spine.
His finger is pointing.
I raise my knowledge and pull straight my strength,
stabbed out of groveling
as if all these were merely flesh and bone.

Bushes groan laments against the splintered fence,
and grass blades whisper a chatter so quiet
you get closely and do not hear it.

The man wants sleep but wonders: do enemies yet live?
Every liar is a mirror and every friend what I want,
so perhaps I should wonder, do friends yet live?
Is there a language more vague than friends and this wind?

She has traveled with this man
where brown fields are the truth of mid-day heat
and wondered how she truly knows
one who smiles through words so difficult to say.

Do distant oaks stand a line of cool?
Or, like thunderheads over the mountains,
offer relief delivering pressure?

They live life like the gap in the stride of shoe falls,
longing to hear a word so true it is substance,
yearning to blanket love in the rise and fall cave of winds
where close marches the beat of motive.

But the south wind blows through the screen
a channel of breath between two backs in bed.
The anxiety of trees is music for dreaming.

He stood in the entry as we were going out,
elated and stamped the booming floor,
growled at them, clawed the air a stained hand,
man as animal in jubilant pretend
and the dog barked, shivering.

We took the boys to the beach
so they chased the waves in and out
and screamed happy fear,
a child’s fear of danger that never quite touches.
But of a sudden they were quiet
and sat making signs with driftwood.
We laughed to them the meanings
but their serious faces cast mystery.

Seagulls sounded the kind of cry that pierces a pleasant dream.
The dog snapped at their shadows as they passed across the sand

You slide from scene to scene
and no meaning takes you.
Over large creatures still their faces
and no words greet you.

What can I say?
Not even the irony of unhappy kids
and angry parents is of any value.
Just believe in your heart that you are good
and lo! Dreams come true.

Yet outside the castle lives an animal
more demon than any fairytale.
Off the road where busses pace and
beyond the median of mowed grass
stands a wall of tree and vine yet untouched.
Look and you cannot see.
Enter and you may not know.
But she is there like a myth
in the swampy heart of your careful footfalls:
Perhaps her thick green hide once beautiful skin,
her yellow eyes once blue,
their narrow once innocent.
Do not look and you will see.
Stand too close and then you know
when the hiss and the steam:
It was like this that men once called her Dragon.