COVERED IN DOG HAIR AND GRACE

Some holiday highlights, chosen especially for mom and dad.

A POEM

I was introduced to a new friend in a book this week: Anne Sexton, an American poet (1928-1974). Her book, The Awful Rowing Toward God, met me at just the right place. Here is a poem with whiffs of Advent:

THE EARTH
by Anne Sexton

God loafs around heaven,
without a shape
but He would like to smoke His cigar
or bite His fingernails
and so forth

God owns heaven
but He craves the earth,
the earth with its little sleepy caves,
its bird resting at the kitchen window,
even its murders lined up like broken chairs,
even its writers dipping into their souls
with jackhammers,
even its hucksters selling their animals
for gold,
even its babies sniffing for their music,
the farm house, white as a bone,
sitting in the lap of its corn,
even the statue holding up its widowed life,
even the ocean with its cupful of students,
but most of all He envies the bodies,
He who has no body.

The eyes, opening and shutting like keyholes
and never forgetting, recording by thousands,
the skull with its brains like eels --
the tablet of the world --
the bones and their joints
that build and break for any trick,
the genitals,
the ballast of the eternal,
and the heart, of course,
that swallows the tides
and spits them out cleansed.

He does not envy the soul so much.
He is all soul
but He would like to house it in a body
and come down
and give it a bath
now and then.

POMEGRANATE

I want to live
the way
I eat pomegranates
in season

Attentive to each squirting seed
Fingers engaged and messy
Each little bite is
saving me