HOMAGE FROM MOUNT WRUNG FOR ONE FATHERING STILL

ONE ON ONE

Spending the day with one.

That rare thing,

maybe the rarest in family,

in family of man. This family

here. Nothing

but heaven breaking through

the veil of the world,

William Law says.

Oh cleric, clear the air:

Duns Scotus 1266-1308,

a way of distinguishing

between different aspects

of the same thing. Haecceity.

Be my word of the day

blinking from school signs.

Franciscan friars build

a cairn marking 700 years

of your birth. A Scot.

Univocity of being.

Formal distinction waiting for one.

Thisness. Individual nature.

Not common nature.

God's will and human freedom

find me on snow-mountain trails

skiing with grandchildren

sound sifting Christ search

once more held to mountain-edge

by the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Way out of the world, Father.

Way, way out of the world.

*

Christ charging word burning yet!

But don't they still hate the poem

burgeoning, light-full, unfearing suddenness

present in childrhyme,

sounding ski-song singing snowswish.

*

IMMORTAL DIAMOND

Father Hopkins on a stool in the pulpit.

*

"ALL THINGS COUNTER, ORIGINAL, SPARE AND STRANGE"

...and you have passed beyond mechanical necessity.

...the fine delight that fathers thought.

...and I that die these deaths that feed the flame.

...Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

...admire, and do oherwise.

...all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am.

...the foot is the daylabourer.

...until then, it is not performed, it does not perform, it is not itself.

...what he calls variety I call sameness.

...this to hoard unheard, / heard unheeded.

...selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe and shelterless.

...the handsome heart.

...slovenly with the eyes, but with your ears,

            as if the paper were declaiming it to you.

...laced with fire of stress.

...his mystery must be instressed, stressed.

...in all this our Lord goes his own way.

...as if my eye were still growing.

...the eye and the ear shut up...inscape cannot come.

...the inscapes they had lost.

*

Held to the mountain, then,

the child and I, by this thin edge

of sharpened steel.

Jim Bodeen

Late January, 2018