A Churchgoer Passes My Yard on Sunday Morning
written by: Eric Robert Nolan
She seems
smart and responsible, somehow.
There’s assurance in her
brisk and purposeful pace,
passing in her bright Peach,
trim and tailored suit.
I see no sanctimony, only
commitment to some task.
There’s order all about her. I picture
parishes of prompt accountants.
She has an incongruity
with my unordered lawn
as she passes in Peach.
The high and wild Green
is how I ornament
my unmarried days.
My lawn is in constant apostasy.
It has lost its faith
in the arrival of mowers
and conscientious owners.
This morning, my secular pen
serves its agnostic art;
her spiritual path
serves salvation.
The high and unkempt grass
is my Green aesthetic.
Archetypes scuttle like beetles
on soil soft and Black —
as deep and as concealing as
the Jungian collective.
Bright dandelions
announce themselves in Yellow –
nascent ideas
pleading to be plucked,
as bright as the sun, as bright
as the pious’ Peach-colored suit.
Each stands over secrets –
Each stems up
from an interminable Earth
deep and vast and dark.
Under tectonic plates,
Magma burns in its belly.
In all our buried selves
— down deep –
Is the heat sufficient
To soften our stone?
Maybe next week I’ll engage her.
None of that nonsense
about “The Culture War.”
We’re both human. We both
stand over secrets. Beneath us,
miles below, is magma.
Red rock runs in bright burning currents.
Were the lions facing Daniel any different
than the Lion that Auden envisioned
in “The Sea and the Mirror,”
ever insatiable and
ravenous for metaphor?
Or maybe I’ll ask her about
The snake that troubled Adam.
It spoke, didn’t it?
Were there verses in its mouth?
Did its tongue
hint at inner dichotomies?
Might it have crept
down from The Tree of Knowledge
onto a poet’s lawn
to catechize slyly in rhyme?
In both our souls or muses, we
stand over secrets; we both
concern ourselves with serpents, and
magma burns in our hearts.
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