Poem Against the Lesser Lights

Tonight the sky is crowded past mercy.
Silver upon silver,
cold seed after cold seed
strewn through the black field above me.
I lift my face to it
like an empty bowl.
I call this praise.
I call it wonder.

But the pupils begin to graze.
My wonder puts on teeth.
I feel the change first in the throat,
then under the ribs:
that bright clean greed
that wants not the Giver
but the glitter,
not the bread of being
but the jeweled crust of it.
I could have lived on splendor
and died of famine in the act of admiring.

So I cry out—
O Christ,
hidden Sun behind all suns,
do not soothe me with more lanterns.
Come as the hunger that unmasks hunger.
Come as the fire that knows what it is for.
Eat every lesser brightness out of me,
every silver lie the eye kneels to,
every little god that shines
and cannot keep a soul alive.

And something answered
harder than comfort.

Not thunder.
A weight of silence.
The night did not darken;
it went inward.
The constellations drew together
like filings to a buried magnet.
A brightness without glitter
pressed through my sternum.
My name loosened.
The edges of me opened.
One by one the bright coins of heaven
fell through my blood
until even awe was stripped of ornaments
and stood barefoot.

I was no longer looking.
I was being looked through.
My mouth forgot its beggar’s pecking at sparks.
My lungs learned a darker praise.
The stars remained,
but as witnesses,
not wages for wanting.

Now when the heavens flower above me
I do not reach to wear them.
I wait for the wound behind their burning.
O hidden Sun,
keep pouring Your invisible noon
through every light that fails me,
until all that glitters without feeding
goes out,
and the soul,
quit of its star-hunger,
lives by what it cannot spend.

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