Poetry: Two Things That I Love

​Two things that I love, love more than life
because they antecede my life--
and give my life to me--
can’t even be in the same room together.
One is an inky, shimmering dark, the other,
words constellating shimmering lies.
And if not lies, then half-truths that,
in falling short in describing the other thing I love,
falsify it in the mind and sometimes erase it from the heart until--
like invisible ink that is so strong and clearly visible at first,
yet inexorably fades away--this luminous
signature of divine reality is, thankfully,
retraced. Again and again.
This is the nature of the divine experience.

​It has come to pass that I cannot
live without either of these very beautiful things:
words that fail to describe divine
reality and divine reality that itself defies description.
Somehow the cognitive dissonance, between
these two things that I love,
uncomfortable like the voice of a singer
singing always just slightly out of tune
that becomes their signature--think Madonna--
and that, if the pitch were corrected,
would make that sound unrecognizable--
and therefore, maybe not as appealing--
this cognitive dissonance I am speaking of
that is caused by the failure of words to peel
the true form of reality from its cloak of
shimmering darkness, becomes incorporated
into the unique flavor of this divine reality
that I love more than life because it antecedes
my life and gives my life to me.

​It may therefore be possible to say that
could words and the divine come together
without causing any distortion in either, neither
might remain as appealing as it is now. It is, perhaps,
the struggle of words to define the indefinable
that gives them their tragic, and also heroic, charisma.

It may be that the very nature of the unsayableness
of the divine--that cognitive dissonance
between the experienced and the retold--
is what enacts its greatest allure.

​1/9/19