Read an Excerpt
Lovesongs & Reproaches
PASSIONATE CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD
By L. WILLIAM COUNTRYMAN Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2010 L. William Countryman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-2730-0
CHAPTER 1
I
And there was light
You there! Maker of all!
Why did you not do better?
Let there be light! Ah, yes,
the fireworks at the beginning were a good touch,
appealing to the ten-year-old in everyone.
But the working out of the details
has proved as much failure as creation.
Your resources are infinite,
but you cast half-finished works
aside as if you had no time
to bring them to perfection. Mars
circles the Sun, frozen
and dry. The mammoths are gone.
And just look at us!
We used to say we were the crown
of your work—much honor it did you!
Yes, we, ignorant, stupid,
petty, arrogant, cooperating
with evil when not inventing it
ourselves. Why did you not
do better? Do we ask so much?
To be safe from pain and disaster
and from one another, to have
what we need when we need it.
Call us self-centered, but do we
have a choice? We know
our limits—one life here
and then whatever's hidden
in your hand. Don't try
to buy us off with flashes
of beauty. The perfect sunrise
today only means
the drought continues and deepens,
not that the weeds in my garden
notice.
Your choice of canvas—
that's the problem. Your canvas
was too small. This vast
universe is still too limited.
Every yes entails a no
somewhere. The clash, the conflict,
the competition shapes us who we are.
Evolution was a sloppy choice,
a clumsy tool. What could it do
but cobble monsters together,
leaving inside us scraps
of the past, fish-parts that fail
the demands of life in air?
Perhaps you thought it generous
painting your infinite vision
across this poor world, this patch
of clay. We live in the gulf
between the vision and your choice of medium.
Still, there is sunrise
in tones of gold and rose
with birdsong to welcome it.
Who can turn his back on it?
Who refuse the renewal of the day?
II
Outsized Supernatural Bodies
In the old time, I think it was easier.
There was a god for everything,
small gods with one thing to do
and doing it well. Grant me
a holiday with Horace at the spring
of Bandusia, the sacrifice, the feast
to follow, the assurance of water,
clear and cold, whatever
the season. One thing to hold onto
for certain. O fons Bandusiae,
splendidior vitro! There was the war,
of course—and Horace on the wrong side.
But he came through all right.
Mars must have liked him—
and Augustus, himself a god-to-be.
All right, I've fallen into the pit
of travel–writing: the romance
of being pampered for a week in foreign
places, other times.
No one dreams of being
a field slave on Horace's farm.
What god cared about them?
Better yet, we want to visit
Phoebus—his palace "lifted up
on towering columns ... brilliant
with flashing gold, sleek
ivory covered the roofs,
wide doors gleamed with silver,
the artistry outdoing even
the materials." Yes, we
do remember that Phaethon came
to no good there. But we
will moderate our desires, stay out
of the solar stables, just
enjoy the view—and hope
no rival, jealous deity
has noticed us peering over
the balustrades at the world below.
Oh yes! I know the danger.
Euripides taught me: a devotion
too single-minded, court
paid too exclusively
to one god among the many—
this endangers a mortal.
Artemis for the hunt, but
don't forget to honor
Aphrodite for her gifts
or you'll wind up like Hippolytus,
a torn mess of blood and bones,
lying in your chariot's wreckage.
But superstitious folk never
lack for worries anyway.
How much is that "too much"
that transgresses a god's prerogatives?
Where to draw the line?
When to supplement the humble
service of Pomona on your farm
with offerings to the gods of state,
averting war and the tax collector?
And, for those of us kept safe
by some kind deity
(is it Hygieia?) from the curse
of paranoia, we know that, good
or ill, all comes from the will
of the gods, each governing
a separate sphere, sometimes
quarreling with each other,
sometimes taking revenge,
sometimes smiling, sometimes
colliding, with never a thought of whom
they've smashed between their outsized,
supernatural bodies.
III
Or Luck
Still, it was easier then.
At least, the intellectual labor
was less burdensome. We
were content with small gods, small
explanations, enough to know
that this weal, this woe came
from her, from him—and nothing
to be done. And the old gods
were little freer than we.
Constrained by fate and one another,
they must have learned detachment
of some sort. Artemis, in her last scene,
admits she cannot interfere
with Aphrodite's revenge,
bids her Hippolytus farewell
and leaves him alone to die,
a god's eyes being too pure to watch
the climax of mortality.
Who taught us to ask for more?
to seek a larger whole?
Plato, who made a system
of ideas? Or Alexander,
who made the whole world dream
of mimicking it in empire
and in stone, the stone of cities
and forts and palaces? Neither,
I think. I think it was you—
and the ceaseless, busy interaction
of all that you have made.
We were unsure, of course,
who you might be. Were you
Fortuna, long rumored to control
the destinies of gods and mortals
alike? And was it true, then,
that you were beyond all worship,
immune to blandishment? No gambler
would ever think so. We chose
to take precautions. Why not
worship the Luck of Antioch
with temple, with rites, her image
on our coins? It can't hurt.
Hey! for centuries it seemed
to work. And then not.
Too bad, but we couldn't just
go back to the old stories.
So Zeus was king of the gods?
Yes, but only king.
He never could get round
his wife in that business of Io.
You drove us to think bigger.
If Fate, Luck, Fortune
is what there is, so what?
An explanation that explains nothing.
There is no story there,
no Why. Only Democritus'
rain of atoms endlessly
catching on one another,
turning, wheeling, snagging,
producing meaningless clumps
only to part again.
Ah! the atom! yes!
Luck with a longer name.
IV
Who maketh the clouds his chariot
Who, then? We couldn't
start at the One and work
our way down the chain. The One,
the Monad, resists division
even in the mind.
How to connect the ideal, the imagined
One with all the little
multitudes that fill the world:
ants and aphids, pollen,
bees, nectar, birds?
(The flycatcher perches on the loggia
that carries the wisteria, its blooms
now shrunken to dry, papery
fragments, each with a dot
of purple still at its center,
then swoops to collect
some little flying morsel.)
Or we could dig deeper:
the swarm of microorganisms
that till and enrich the soil,
feeding on one another
and the earth. The Many
are easier than the One.
And so we reached toward you
through one of the little gods.
Or perhaps you reached toward us.
Who can ever tell
how a friendship began?
Who first saw whom and loved?
Whose glance was the one returned
and whose the returning eye?
Was the admiration and delight
a gift or rather the answer
to a gift? How could we know,
so early on, what treasures
would emerge in time?
You were a two-bit desert
god, crashing through
arid mountains on your chariot
of storm, your thunder shattering
what your lightning did not burn
and torrents of water filling
the gulches and drowning whatever
could not escape. But then,
the aftermath: the flush of green,
seeds that had lain in wait
for water, grass for gazelles,
fat flies for lizards.
We knew we could not tame you.
But you invited love,
the love awakened by cool shadows
in hot places, flowing water
amid barren stones,
the ribbon of green clinging
to the streambed in dry lands.
You cannot be surprised if we thought
you angry, given the lightning
and the flood. It would be a while
before we learned your surest,
most revealing voice
is found in stillness.
V
A Riddle for a Name
But so many voices!
One who speaks everywhere
is hard to hear. How
to distinguish tone from tone
among the unremitting
stream of sounds? Sometimes,
perhaps, we hear not yours,
but another voice, one
that means us no good.
Sometimes we hear all wrong;
the ear, perverted by the heart,
turns "fill" to "kill," turns
"love" to "slave." Your showing
of yourself, however clear,
however vivid, however
sharply delineated, always
falls at length into our meager
yet tenaciously selfish grasp,
there to be transformed
into the god we want.
Where, then, to begin?
You reached out to attract
our notice and to claim
our love. So the conversation
begins, you trying
to speak our language,
to say in it things that couldn't
yet be said, we learning
to set your language
into our own, experimenting
with words and images, failing,
succeeding, perverting, purifying,
perfecting the words of truth,
as we suppose, only to discover
that we have locked you out
by locking our words in.
The purest grasp of your word
is often the clumsy beginning,
still full of due uncertainty,
still baffled, still thrown off balance
by encountering you, the One.
There was Moses in the desert,
raised a prince and taught
the ways of court, washed
in the abundant waters of the Nile,
on which he'd been set afloat
to meet his fate. He learned
his dual heritage and rent it
apart in an act of violence.
And now he lives in the country
of strangers, stranger still
in its water, not given from above,
the great stream bearing it down
from distant mountains, but pulled up
by human sweat from below.
Instead of the rituals of court
and its essential gossip,
now he learns to tell
good pasturage from poisonous.
He knows the rites of mating
sheep and goats. His days
are full of predictable things
that his profession tells him
how to master. Even the
unpredictables are of a
finite number and quickly
recognized.
And then
the bush burns and yet
it is not burnt. At first,
he thinks it one more foreign
phenomenon, albeit rare,
of this foreign land and goes
to look more closely. The voice
warns him to remove his shoes.
That alone was enough to call
a place of worship into being.
But you wanted more. You gave
him your riddle-name: "I am
what I am/I will be who
I will be/I cause what I cause."
Warning enough against trying
to pin you down! And so
you sent him off to do
the impossible, save the slaves,
lead the unwilling, make
a people. When he complained
and wanted proof, you said,
"I'll tell you what. Once
you've done it, you'll come back here
to worship."
And this is how
you leave us, for ever trying
to grasp certainty and for ever
coming up short of the whole.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lovesongs & Reproaches by L. WILLIAM COUNTRYMAN. Copyright © 2010 L. William Countryman. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
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