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Characters

Aunt Duly is here wallpapering our kitchen.
She is seventy-one years old
but still paints silos and moves pianos.
If I bet her, she will touch her palms
to the floor without bending her knees.

When she first sees me, long hair and beard,
she comes down the ladder waving her brush:
"Judas Priest, Kev, when I was a girl,
they used to beat guys like you with chairs."

She has been going up and down this last hour
as if her ladder is an escalator,
telling me about drunken gravediggers
or the grocer who wouldn't serve lawyers.
I'm afraid she'll slip or faint,

but she is coming down the ladder,
telling me about Barney Ruckle in the back pew
quietly mocking each bead during the rosary:
"Gimme a nickel, Mary. Gimme a nickel, Mary.
Gimme a nickel ..."

Going up the ladder
because she really does have work to do,
she pauses halfway and says,
"You know, they're all dead now,
all those characters who used to make us laugh."

 

Kevin FitzPatrick

 

q

You can always tell a real friend; when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.

 

        Laurence J. Peter

q

Only in darkness can you see the stars.

    Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Brahms

It must be that my early friendship with defeat
Has given me affection for the month of August.
The potato fields belong to early night.

So many times as a boy I sat in the dirt
Among dry cornstalks that gave assurances
Every hour that Francis has his ear to the night.

Columbus's letters tell us that we will receive
The gifts that mariners all receive at the end—
Memories of gold and a grave in the sand.

The shadow of a friend's hand gives us
Promises similar to those we received from
The light under the door as our mother came near.

Each of us is a Jacob weeping for Joseph.
We are the sparrow that flies through the warrior's
Hall and back out into the falling snow.

I don't know why these images should please me
So much; an angel said: "In the last moment before night
Brahms will show you how loyal the notes are.

 

Robert Bly

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Nativity

 

In the dark, a child might ask, What is the world?

just to hear his sister

promise, An unfinished wing of heaven,

just to hear his brother say,

a house inside a house,

but most of all to hear his mother answer,

One more song, then you go to sleep.

 

How could anyone in that bed guess

the question finds its beginning

in the answer long growing

inside the one who asked, that restless boy,

the night’s darling?

 

Later, a man lying awake,

he might ask it again,

just to hear the silence

charge him, This night

arching over your sleepless wondering,

 

this night, the near ground

every reaching-out-to overreaches,

 

just to remind himself

out of what little earth and duration,

out of what immense good-bye,

 

each must make a safe place of his heart,

before so strange and wild a guest

as God approaches.

 

            Li-young Lee

q

It may be that when we no longer know what to do,

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go,

we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled in not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

 

                                 Wendell Berry