IN PRAISE OF FRAGMENTS

WHAT I LEARNED FROM SILENCE

AFTER THE CONVERSATION

Where nothingness takes me from here

follows the cairns right back to liturgy

and words. Grape Nuts and blueberries

in Greek Yogurt tips my hand,

doesn't it. I live behind a walled

garden of trees. An idler,

I open a book of desert poems

and read, We are so much more

than what we are. Mmm.

My friend arrives. High Mountain

Green Tea talk and listen. Hmm.

The listening. Through

to silence where God, active

agent, legislates. I'll be rested, then,

listening, a kind of dizziness,

this levitation. This lightness.

God speaking through silence.

Fragments on the page. Fumbling for them.

Sacred reading. Thrill of a new word,

florilegia, flowers from which the diligent,

O desert father, flowering!

can draw out sweetness. What can't be said

in words, but sung, when you can't be full-joy quiet.

Vanessa Zoltan's flower garden of quotations

delivers a new text. If you treat something

as sacred, it becomes sacred. Safe, generative rigor.

What gets one better at loving.

                                                  For more

than a week now,

I've been reading a single paragraph of a book review

for a book I haven't read. Here is the sentence

I've been carrying from the pastor writing the review:

The forgiven one is made clean without the opportunity

to argue her case, which is an act of true grace.

Timothy Brown is the pastor's name,

and the book, by Benjamin J. Dueholm,

Sacred Signposts: Words, Water, and Other Acts of Resistance.

Resistance here, is meant to denote the secular world.

Collected fragments walked through the day,

you're suggesting they're sacred? Practice

of the daily notebook, no more than that.

That sacred. That's Zoltan. Daily practice

of poets, many others. Zoltan, Jewish

child of Auschwitz parents, athiest pastor,

claims fragments as new text.

                                                For instance--?

                                                This morning--?

What happens among Christians can still astonish...

...the modern world after Christendom is receiving

            its own frightening diagnosis...

...a kind of healing it can neither imagine nor grant...

...resist this world and point to another one

...they are brutally worldly and literal

...words which confront...

...water...

...ludicrous pardon...

...prayer, praise, and worship, which steal time and labor

            away from the world

...an unlikely itinerary...

...not an explanation but the thing that resists explanation...

...deciding what matters...

Who's that?

Who's that?

This is me.

That's Benjamin J. Dueholm, Sacred Signposts.

That's a new text?

Thesis of the despised notebook.

I'm listening to Tommy Espinoza eulogize Senator John McCain.

John, I'm a Democrat! So?

Returning from my bike ride, emptying fragments

loaded before I left, I pull into the house

of the truck driver, Greg, Greg says,

I got to get me a bike.

Larry Fitzgerald, wide receiver for Arizona Cardinals,

says of John McCain: He ran for President.

I run out of bounds.

The thing I have against the poem

is that when I read the notebook,

it's got more blood running through it

than most poems.

                                    My friend and I,

we were talking about practice.

Jim Bodeen

29-30 August 2018