Seven hundred and twenty five years ago

Some peasant sang my phone number aloud in fun

And in play

In slices of wisdom I smell his dressing oil

Cassia, calamus, myrrh

Making fragrant God’s frying pan

This triduum, neither of us will partake lightly

We rededicate with harshness

And effort to the mystery the

Ratio of hunger  

and dressing oil

In the final cold, rainy Lenten days

Thankful to be dried out on the clothesline of misery

It is  how it has been— we are holders of many dim candles

When the worried lock their houses

And the doers divide garments

And the grass cutter drags himself along

Desire stirred impossibly between centuries among friends

I look to my left, I ask him how we could ever

Thirst after the same thing the

--Sumum Bonum, the light beyond light

How we could ever on certain dark Thursdays

Or Sundays in public prayer, nestled with the old, foolish and saintly

Sweating, willing,

Feel a Sumum Bonum thirsting after us

Some delicate spring wants to be born– so let it