you teach me light
slightly dangerous poems
Melaney Poli
Foreword by Jeanie Tomasko
you teach me light
slightly dangerous poems
Copyright © 2018 Melaney Poli. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Resource Publications
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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-4772-7
hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-4773-4
ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-4774-1
Manufactured in the U.S.A. 09/17/15
The whole of life lives in the verb “seeing.”
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Foreword
It’s like walking into an old shop filled with drawers; each drawer contains a map and each map wants to take you. The poems in You teach me light take you to a place you’ve been but didn’t really see, a place you’ve not been but ache to see, a place that will teach you light, yes, and that “art . . . demands total faith, even surrender, maybe the death of the life you walked in with.” Poli’s small maps take you everywhere you must go if you want to walk out of the shop and “days and months later know you have not breathed the same way since.”
Jeanie Tomasko
Acknowledgements
Anglican Theological Review: Arizona; variation and fugue on a happy liturgical typo; You teach me light
The Christian Century: Salzburg, Republic of Austria, July 2006; Horizons
Clare: Ursa Vestiarii
Julian’s Window: from a manual on forgiveness
RightHandPointing: Thank you for small beginnings
Thank you for small beginnings
for the edge of the sheet tucked back
the pillowcase pulled on, thank you
for the one corner swept, the linen
basket filled, for one box emptied,
one letter begun, for one spoon washed,
one verse of a poem written down,
for one shoe placed
neatly by another, the needle threaded,
the first page read, thank you, thank you,
thank you
the monk who wrote himself to death
In this world one collects things, you see,
and to some certain falls the thankless chore
of garnering words, stringing them one
upon another, and if you’re auspicious,
relinquishing them at a profit (it’s known
as selling one’s soul). To be sure,
for the prophets the cost will be higher,
the collection more probing and pitiless;
and depending on the lie of your fears
your words are a net, or a fire:
a snare your readers can catch you in, or your hell
of feeding an insatiable blaze.
And either way it’s a hall of mirrors,
where each beaded word tricks the light,
and no amount of spooling will spell
any certain escape from this maze.
There is a way out of course, and quite
simple: the ring of fire, the breath
of air, and the land beyond guile
and names. You can get there by prayer—
or by letting go of knowing the way,
both are the same: a kind of death
to what was before, with a smile
that knows there is nothing to say.
On missing my tour of the St John’s Bible, Collegeville, Minnesota
Of course it sucks. I didn’t come a thousand miles and bucks
to get disappointed this much. I expected crême brulée, got
a mouthful of baking powder. Scrubbed out my expectations.
Some mistake.
I like to think art has an answer to everything; it’s an artist’s sin.
Maybe I just wanted to get smashed on beauty, stoned on lovely
adjectives. Or maybe the hope that beholding will make me
able to see.
Should I say (I who have learned, something) God you are my
best illumination, it’s by your being that I see? Should I rather say
I now go out and see people like illuminations, walking? Perhaps
I don’t know my power
or perhaps I don’t desire. And I know nothing would ever be
enough, and yet I will go on craving. I have an artist’s most
irrational faith in what can be made from what seems to be
nothing. See,
I could say Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker, or
that it brings me to my senses, or strips me of illusion, or
that there is every possibility that what I don’t see can still
illuminate me.
Fable
Let me touch one soul by my art, he said. I have a fire.
But he wondered: what if the whole world refuses to hear?
He was good for a while at throwing brilliant bouquets
of words. He could make you see with a splash of vowels.
Color your mind by metaphors, story. Editors loved
him. What happened? If you’re reading this,
he found the real diamond, better bliss,
an end large enough to surpass all he loved.
He revised to the woods, stopped publishing. The owls
survey his notebooks, words for the sky, not bookcases.
There are unknown splendors