Spiritual Sunday
Today being the Feast of the Virgin, the anniversary of Mary being assumed into heaven (so tradition has it), I share this Carl Phillips poem. In it we see Mary thinking back to the moment many years before when was visited by the angel Gabriel.
Or that’s what she believes happened. Others are skeptical. After all, isn’t the reality we know the only reality there is? When Mary awakes, she acknowledges that “morning was what it had always been.” She may feel “marooned in the air,” but the world around her slowly comes back into focus, nicking the blooms of suggestion.
How is one to believe in mystery when everyday items appear as they have always appeared (“every seam or pocket slowly retrieved”). Likewise, what she hears is what she has always heard, “the clubbed foot of routine, no voices, no clatter of dreams.” Her father delivers a kind of verdict as he spits into the yard. By his and everyone else’s standards, her vision is an unseemly desire to touch godhead.
Yet her being “no mystic” adds credence to the vision. Despite everything, “I saw what I saw.”
Visitation
by Carl Phillips
When it was over, they told me
that the creak of wings folding
was only the bed, that shutters
do not clap of themselves. Morning
was what it had always been, any woman
marooned in the air,
the nicked
blooms of suggestion, in the lamp,
in the lemonwood stool, every seam
or pocket slowly retrieved,
were the usual ones, what
everyone knows. Father spat
into the unswept yard below,
as if it too were an unseemly desire,
and passed through the door.
I am no mystic. I know
nothing rises that doesn’t
know how to already.
In my ears, only the clubbed
foot of routine, no voices, no
clatter of dreams: but I saw
what I saw.