Friends,
Last week
kindly featured some of my work in their ongoing Artist Chair series. Head over to the post to hear a recording of me reading two jazzy poems from Forbearance. I’ve included the text of the poems below if you’d like to follow along 🎷
Off Silence
Hip mystics tell me silence is the salve
for a disintegrated soul, a sort
of detox from that stupefying din
called postmodernity, even a sine
qua non for making out the quiet Voice
within. Perhaps. As yet, I still enjoy
a bit of bebop while I do the dishes,
the shining saxophone of Lester Young
spinning in my living room. Or, stuck
in traffic on a gloomy day, I’d rather
put on something cool by Clifford Brown
to pass the time, a trinity of brass
and bass and ride converging with the verve
of fathomless potentialities
becoming what they only could become.On Silence
Dishes done, both sides of a record spun,
stylus skating silently along
its runout groove as gusts of snow outside
snuff out the lastlight of another day.
Another day comes down to this: my sense
that silence never proved an emptiness.
New song alert
In other news, I recently released a new single. “West River Song” is a sort of folk hymn to the Black Hills of South Dakota—just me and an acoustic guitar. It’s been an eventful summer, and I haven’t spent nearly enough time playing music, but I’m happy to share this song before the leaves start to change. Find it wherever you listen.
A good word
In Christianity it is not humans who come to God with a compensatory gift, but rather God who comes to humanity in self-giving in order to overcome the divine-human alienation … This is why Christian worship and ethics focus so intently upon gratitude. The beginning point is thankful acceptance of the divine gift. Worship centers on thanksgiving (eucharistia). Counter to ordinary human expectations, the Christian life consists in taking the risk of allowing ourselves to be endowed with gifts from God.
— Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity