the story of my life is sand

the story of my life is sand
forty years of wandering and
yelling 
	at a rock
tablets shatter 
like all my good intentions
dust to dust
all i am is dust
all i can taste 
        is dust
all that fills my mouth
        is dust 
                      and empty vows
i said i’d trust i have never once 
really trusted i said i was yours 
i have never once really held fast
to you
the story of my life 
		       is sand

is all i am dust?

the story of my life is rain
water pouring out of a 
stone i struck, water to	
	raise us up 
streams, streams 
in the desert
rain on this rocky soil
rain that should not come
but always does
	if i trust
and often
	when i don’t
from the ruins of my faithlessness 
dew from the deeps, 
river from the heavens
growing from ashes all that i
	burnt in my rage

the story of my life is
        water 
		      in the dry land
	vines
		     from the rocks

the story of my life
	is sand
		   in the glass-blower’s hands
the dust takes on life
sparkles and dances
slips and falls and rivers and runs
you gather us up and say: 
you are dust
you will live 
       forever
my water will wash you
	clean
my forests and gardens will grow
        in you

forty years of folly
and millennia more to come
still you call the dust
	to life
and rain upon our 
	dry ground

---

I guess I’m continuing the desert theme from last week’s post. I wrote this one a couple of years ago but I’ve always loved it. I’m also rereading Ezekiel right now and man, there’s something about those Old Testament stories. A banished people wandering in a wilderness unblistered. Prophets lying on their sides for a year and a month only to rise and cook food in dung. Water gyser-ing from rocks, axeheads de-poisoning ponds, stone pillows spinning dreams of cosmic staircases. It’s so crazy and foreign and fever dream-y, and it’s also like, well, water in a desert.

In one of my new favorite books, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told, Harrison Scott Key—just a comedian and dad of three trying to reckon with his wife having a passionate affair with their neighbor—describes his experience with “this old and weird book”:

The Word of God calls itself many things: a sword, a hammer, a lamp. In places, the Word is called fire. In others, food. The book of John says that the Word isn't just with God or from God—it is God. I don’t even pretend to know what this means. Over the years, the Bible has cleaved me in two like a sword and broken my brain like a hammer and cut through fog like a lamp. It has filled me and burned me, but mostly it has given me hope: that I am not as alone as my dolor might make me feel, that my travails are mine but they are not new in the world, that humans have cried out to the heavens in astonishment and want for as long as we have had lungs to cry. If our species can feel such anguish and write it down and pass it up the branches of the family tree, then that gives me hope. I stood far out on a branch now and had little else to comfort me but this old and weird book. I finally felt equipped to do what I hadn’t possessed the wisdom and strength to do ever before in my life: I felt as courageous as Saint George before the monster of being itself, fearful, yes, but armored, wilier, wiser, possessing a hope and faith that felt stronger than any dragon.

So I guess this doesn’t really have to do with the meaning of the poem and more with the imagery I’m using in it, the point being that for some reason these Old Testament images sometimes seem to be the only ones that capture what I’m feeing and I’m thankful for when I can let this Book delight and awe and confuse—and yes, awaken—me. Submitting to the text versus dominating, as Eugene Peterson and many biblical scholars talk about.

But that’s a post for another time.

See, I am doing a new thing!
    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
    and streams in the wasteland.

- Isaiah 43:19

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In Other Words…

I’m starting a new segment in these posts! I’ve been doing a lot of reading and watching and therefore writing because I like to review things (is that narcissistic? intellectually valuable? a waste of time? who can say), and I figured I’d link them here in case you want some reviews or recommendations.

goodreads (books):

How to Stay Married by Harrison Scott Key (5 stars) | The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (4 stars) | Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard (5 stars)

it’s been a great book summer for me

letterboxd (movies):

The Hiding Place (4.5 stars) | Barbie (4 stars) | Oppenheimer (4.5 stars)

yes this was my Barbenheimer week and it was so great

Happiest of mid-Augusts to you all!

~ Aberdeen