the secret changes

My pilgrim heart
waits for you
in the middle of
its own unrecognized
silent compass.
Your wordless psalm
lets me pray along
with it, all of us
alive together
here in the secret
changes of faith's
transfiguring night.

©Laura Sorrells 2015
all rights reserved

another time

The last time I stayed up all night I was so excited about getting up before 3 a.m. to chant psalms at Vigils that I couldn’t sleep. I sat on my bed in my little room in the guest house of the Trappist monastery in Kentucky where I was on retreat and read a little from Kazantzakis’ novel about Saint Francis of Assissi and tried to meditate. Saint Francis has always been a vitally important and iconic figure for me, singularly compelling even before I began this part of my spiritual journey. I remember reading part of the Kazantzakis novel, for instance, back in Athens, Georgia, in the spring of 1996, not long before I left town on what felt like a whim to me at the time. I had been full of fear and despair then, and the book had been inexplicably comforting to me. I think I put it aside pretty fast when I moved in with my mother in the little mountain town where I still live now, some seventeen years later. At any rate, I didn’t sleep at all last month, that first hot July night on retreat at Gethsemani, even though I was exhausted from the long drive. I went into that odd, liminal space where shadows play games with the edges of a person’s eyesight and sounds sing songs that aren’t there. I know I was just really tired, but I felt keenly alive and powerfully happy. Almost giddy with joy, really. The monastery church there has a specific scent, as does the one in Georgia, an aroma that is both earthy and austere, but in a totally different way from the granite and evergreen and moss of Arabia Mountain. Not wild like a landscape but not exactly domesticated, either. I went into the church a little early and sat in the back, where the retreatants sit during the liturgy of the Hours, and just waited for things to begin. It was very dark, very quiet. The silence was broken by almost nothing, only a few small sounds here and there, just the settling of wood, the whisper of small wind against glass, and the breath of the body of everything, dark and kind and unknowable and empty in the absence of song and speech.

the last time

I wrote this in January of 2008 in response to a writing prompt: "When did you last stay up all night?" For some reason it resonated for me this evening as I ran across it accidentally in some old files.

It was last season, before all the leaves fell. I sat by a fire and renewed it when it diminished and read poems and wrote some things down in my notebook. I listened to the quiet. I held my old gray cat against my bare knee and rubbed his head. I thought about my grandmother and her painting and how she didn't start doing it till she was over fifty. I took some pictures of small things: a silver pendant, an old acorn I found under a tree in New England, the plumes of color coming off the burning wood in front of me. I didn't even try to sleep. I walked out onto the deck around 3 a.m. and the wind was blowing leaves down in big drifts. I made myself some popcorn and dusted some brewer's yeast onto it. I felt happy in my solitude though also a little lonely. I find that when my singularity is challenged I cling most intensely to these times. It’s good to stay up all night alone from time to time.

Mary Street

Walking home alone

in the electric sheen

of post-thunderstorm
April evening,

the night is lambent

with reawakened moonlight;

the street is tossed

with foolish bits
of flying energy

released from
pre-storm torpor

by the punk
of lightning’s sulphur,

by the voice of thunder
in these mountains.

Branches arc
across the streetside,

narrow dark curves
of dispossessed tree

flung down from
home by wind.

Leaves, like paper-thin mice

with brains made
frantic by rain,

hurry past,

their voices the sylvan inheritance

of each season’s violence,

done to trees:

the pressure of ice
in winter,

its weight on branches
in leafless stillness,

the intemperate blasts of spring,

as cold air gives
way to warm,

as frost is displaced
by the small

bright fires of
growth in wood.

I recall the August blasting

of a favorite white oak by lightning:

A ravaged ash
alone in a dry field,

a scorched sentinel
made electricity’s victim.

Then autumn’s disavowal
of green, its dismantling
of that cloak
of shuddering chlorophyll,

its dispersal of color
into earth,

the souls of sweetgums
made ready

for the ascetic
winter lives of owls

and sleeping creatures,

each naked branch
a voiceless prayer

of restoration
and of pagan grace.

©Laura Sorrells 1996

all rights reserved