While Reflecting on John 1 and the Credo

Light from Light,
we breathed in a sweetness
and beheld the Light,
true God from true God

thought passes like a shadow
side to side from morning to evening
shrinking and stretching and covering
and again from day to day
light to shadow, shadow from light

impressions wrought upon weary skin
by familiar stones

For the waste of our flesh,
For the ways of solitude,
For the weight of doubt,
For the waning of life,
Let us pray to the Lord.

That we be healed,
That we be held in Glory,
That we believe,
That we be alive,
Lord, hear our prayer.

The light shone in the darkness
And so we were shown the Light

African Wildlife

On Thursdays, I have class at 12:45 pm, so I typically spend Thursday mornings sleeping late, wandering around my flat groggily, brewing coffee, and browsing headlines on the internet. I’ll usually shower sometime near noon, and then spend an excessive amount of time standing in front of the mirror twisting my mustache into various shapes and parting my beard in odd places. This last Thursday was no different from any before until I walked into my bedroom and opened the top drawer only to find that it had been commandeered during the night by a rat. He’d shredded the inside surface of the wood into hundreds of shavings which he’d managed to work into a large pile in the middle of my boxer shorts which begs the question, why do rats love my underwear so much?

About a month ago after I hulk-smashed a litter of rats, I went looking for a rat trap so as to catch the mother. All the shop owners I visited sought to sell me glue, which I declined to purchase since it would have required that I personally dispatch the captured rat – a task that I did not wish to perform again despite having proved myself so, ehh… capable. I finally inquired about a rat trap at the maghalaq on Street 60, and was assured, yes, they had one. One minute, please, while the shopkeeper rummaged through a pile to find it. He ducked behind the counter and reappeared with a cage. “Isn’t there anything else?” I asked. There was not. Luckily the trap worked, and in a couple of days I caught momma, took a rickshaw to the other side of town, and let her out in a ditch.

Then, as I’ve already told you, another rat began inhabiting my drawer on Thursday. Or two, actually, it seems to’ve been. I’ve spent the last couple of days entrenched in battle against these Rattus Norvegicus (as opposed to the much more terrible Rattus Rattus), but I have finally triumphed.

So, today I have undertaken the cleaning of my drawers and clothes. I purchased a bottle of Dettol — a substance of ambiguous composition which claims to be a disinfectant that is recommended by “doctors” and is approved by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. And, I have put all the boxers in to wash. Jason is determined to find rat poison to feed to the offender, and I’m not entirely against that, although we’ve looked for it in 3 stores now to no avail. Should more rats attempt to take up residence with us, I have decided that I am going to begin a trade in rat pelts. It is winter, after all, and a rat-skin coat is just the thing to keep one warm on the 70°F winter evenings that will soon be upon us.

  

The Problem

I’ve heard that coffee won’t stain your teeth if you’ll put just a splash of milk in it. When I bared my teeth at the mirror this morning, the vision impressed me that I probably ought to test that theory, but while pouring coffee a few minutes later, I couldn’t bring myself to adulterate the brew. I tried not to think of the grizzle-haired, dirty-toothed face of animal predation that I am certain to acquire after a few more years of coffee drinking.

I pulled out a plate of cinnamon rolls from the fridge to go along with the coffee. I’d decided to make cinnamon rolls yesterday. The whole process had taken about 5 hours and had depended heavily upon the culinary advice of a lady in town whose cinnamon-roll-baking experience I inquired about in numerous phone calls beginning with, “Hey, one more question…” When the rolls were finally baked and glazed, I called her house, asking if she and her husband would like to sample the finished product. They said they’d be delighted, so I dropped by with a plate of rolls and a french press of decaf coffee, and we spent the evening talking and playing with their 3-month old baby girl. Sadie McLean is her name, and although she could smile, she seemed to prefer making spit bubbles with her tongue and jerking her wobbly head around, kicking her pink little feet.

The rolls had been warm and gooey then, but although they were cold this morning, they still tasted good. As I ate I read from Luke 1, and then practiced reciting Mary’s Song from memory a few times. “He has exalted those of humble estate.” I reflected on the promise of exaltation for the lowly and weak which the Gospel echoes over and over. A glance at my clock reminded me that I had language class in an hour, so I finished my reading, hopped through the shower, and hurried back into my room in a towel to get dressed.

I opened my top drawer and grabbed boxer shorts off the top of the stack and started backwards in surprise, dropping the shorts back into the drawer. I lifted them again slowly by a corner and peeked underneath at three little babies asleep, curled up in a pile of my boxer shorts, pink and hairless, with their little tails tucked under them. One of them lifted its face in distress at the light which had suddenly invaded its womb-like darkness, and I dropped the boxers back down. I walked into another room, where some of my laundry was drying on a line and found a pair of dry boxers and put them on. Clearly, a mother rat had crawled into my top drawer the night before and given birth. I dressed myself out of the other drawers, and then returned to my problem in the top one.

I quickly decided that I couldn’t let rats grow in my underwear drawer. Rats carry disease, I reasoned. I remember adding, absurdly, at the time, especially these third-world rats. I realized, though, that moving them was the same as killing them. I could scoop them up and put them in a corner somewhere where they would starve and die. I could place them outside where they’d be eaten – alive and painfully – by street dogs probably. I could kill them myself, quickly. I thought about Darwinism and how these babies and I were just competing for resources. I thought about how the street dogs wouldn’t feel squeamish about tearing them apart for a meal, if I put them outside, and how I probably wouldn’t have to witness the event.

I emptied the drawer item-by-item, careful to shake out everything and always on edge that the mother would leap out at me any second, but she never came. The babies squealed when I took their cushion from them, and they jerked their pink arms around with an infantile incoherence. I took a plastic bag, and with a dirty rag I lifted each one from the bottom of the wooden drawer and dropped it into the bag. They shrieked at the fall. I slipped their bag into yet another plastic bag. The dogs would have to eat something else. I tied off the bottom of the bags and for a moment considered letting them suffocate, but I knew it would take several minutes for them to die that way. I sat the doubled bag on the kitchen counter. Next to it was an industrial voltage-regulator box that weighed about ten pounds and had sides of smooth, flat metal. I lifted it over the sack. I needed to bring it down hard enough to kill them with one blow. I brought it hammering down upon the sack and heard a tiny squeal of life as I lifted it again and brought it down before even a second passed, and then again and again with so much force that I was sure I would break the box itself. The final blow burst the sack open and sent a little splatter of blood and entrails across the counter.

I sat the box down and tried to take a moment to just breathe and think, but I couldn’t because, real or imagined, there was a smell in the room now. Why hadn’t I thought about the bag bursting? It was bound to have a little air trapped in it, so of course it would burst. I pushed the biggest part of the mess into another plastic bag, and then used an old sponge to clean the rest of it. I wiped down the face of my coffee grinder and the side of the voltage-regulator. Blood splatters had already dried on the counter, so I had to scrub them off. I used soap and cleaned the area. I plugged the box in, and it still worked, although I’d thought for sure it was broken.

I hurried back into my room to gather my things, late for class now. My hands shook as I lifted my computer and put it into my bag, but I felt no emotion other than frustration at myself for not feeling something more. My Bible lay open to the epistle reading that had concluded my morning devotion, but I never glanced at it as I ran out the door. “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part, then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

Language Lessons

“He who digs a hole shall fall therein.”
It is the first proverb on everyone’s lips.
Perhaps because there are so many holes
in the pavement, the roofs, the borders,
the law. I sit across from a man who is
living his father’s life again, and contentedly.

Stray whiskers from his brillo pad mustache
wander lonely down the sides of his lips
toward the scruff on his chin. His North
African genealogy has failed to provide him
with the means of growing the full beard so
important for manhood, as says the East.

His tutelage exerts itself over such topics as
card games, the best place to buy a cell
phone charger, and shadiest sheesha bars.
He rocks back slightly, and his head bobs so
faintly that I imagine its rhythmic motion to be
imperceptible to all but me – himself included.

Now is that lull in the language lesson which
can only be diverted by a technique as
clever as stating the obvious: “It rained a lot
last night,” I say. “A lot,” he says. The head-
bobbing continues. I say, “There were large
holes full of water in the street this morning.”

“Yes.” He says, continuing to nod, wearing
the vague smile of a partygoer who expects
entertainment to begin at any moment.
When I fail to provide, he seizes upon one
of my words, and with an unflinching lack of
subtlety, he shares a proverb from memory:

“The person who digs a hole for his friend
to fall in, after a while he will forget that he
dug it and when he’s walking, he’ll fall into
it, himself.” I feel my breathing grow heavier
in the tiniest shade of a chest-swell, like a
secret sigh. “Yes,” I say, my head bobs a bit.

Song of Late Afternoon

I.

What bare feet meet in the tangled beard of bermuda grass,
In the squirrels standing farcically solemn, targeting metatarsi
By the strategic strewing of acorns, in the stabbing jabs of twigs,
Is an imperative to live forever. A fey invocation in the wind howls,
“Let us curl our phalanges for the digitus landings of soft dewey skin
On the shaley shoulders of the river!”

I clamber, rambling, the knees of my jeans in shambles
Up the tradesman’s path, past the lookout point, and
Down the thieves gully to the arching beech whose
Insouciant stance allowed a barefoot adept to ascend.
Twenty-one and foot-naked, perched in his old arms
I hear the desultory susurrus of the tree-beetles
And sip six-dollar whiskey from my hip-flask
Like a Mexican cowboy about to cross the Rio Grande, pardner.

And then slip steadily like a drop of sweat
Down the forehead of a mountain to the browridge,
Where a courageous tree shoots out acutely, above the river.
This nook with a grandiose look over land, river, and life.
Lately discovered by a xenophile craving exile.
I am an imp! (momentarily) A hairy, heathen sprite of the mountain
Dancing now in and out of a cloud of Latakia smoke
And reading old English versions of Persian poetry to
The mice and the sparrows and the baby snakes.

“What does the sun say, if not that it shall cover its nakedness with blinding spite?
What does the moon say, if not that it shall clothe itself in both darkness and in light?”

II.

I should have been an angel, but for the mud cakes tressing my hair.
For there on the hill between striving and rest, I climbed a heavenly stair
And panoplied in light ranked the pantheon sons of great might,
Promethian purposes pale standing bare and exposed in their sight,
So I returned.

There is ever a loneliness along the trail that skirts the tree line.
The trees are inebriated for the air there is thick as red wine.
I break into the river, ginger – for the stones hurt the bones in my feet
There is a laughter in the splash of the brook that is young and honest and sweet,
But it is leaving me.

The sunlight sparkles off slime on the half-sunken trunk of an oak
I stand bare in the waste-deep river that flows around me like a dark cloak.
I look around as the water drowns an ever greater part of the land,
When they let the dam out, I think I will not be able to stand.
Will I float on forever? –

As cresting stream becomes estuary,
          ever eastward in the aestival wind?
Will I reach the sea? — find myself barefoot
          in the brackish mountains of waves, moaning?

I will float with mordant mutterings upon my salt-split sanguine lips.

III.

In the opening and closing of eyes comes an all-ness
Like a realization that even the cloudless sky is full of something
The becoming-ness which confesses,
“What may be unfinished is not thus incomplete! O palimpsest,
Bear your pallor away from the shrouding aesthetic of pain!”

And I, stumbling softly, on the oft water-tumbled
Cobblestones of the crumbling riverbed, hands plunging under,
Halting my lunging form, sending missiles of water into my eyes
That blur the burn of the solar star into something suddenly so un-maleficent
That I behold her, rapt, as a beautiful woman on a far stage, her warmth, a
Weeping soprano strain, sailing through the sleeping darkness.

What ambles ashore wears the same bare-legged hide of a man,
Has swallowed a mystery which will burn like the ancient Temple fire. You can
See it in his face, lambent and waxing but yet weak.
It is the light of the hope that he will find the white garments he seeks,
To clothe him.