Baptism, Water and Fire

A void divides and links us. On that sea

Saint Peter fell like a rock. A raven searched
The flood and was forgotten. Shall we reach
At a whisper's urging, for what we cannor see?

A heart can harden past the reach of tears,

but broken like a bone, may learn to heal:
So Chirst may storm the cloister, burn the veil,
To violate our sanctuaried fear.

Blood red begins a rainbow: sun in rain

Reveals the arc where fire and water meet.
So judgement came to Saul in a blaze of light;
Our souls are formed in light that shines through pain.

Love will meet you ; cross the burning tide,

Although it doesn't seem, we go by twos.
One cannot be convinced: you have to choose.
The bridge is pain. The nun becomes a bride.

- Durant Gullick
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Duet

In the soft wind of some guitar

we had fallen like leaves
upon the bed.
Contentment entered puppylike, and nestled
on the compost of our separateness.
We traversed from relaxing towards becoming,
honey diffusing in our veins.
Silence fell on us like a cobweb.
Words collapsed like constellations
in the predawn grey where time withdraws.
We were a forest ; left alone,
we grew without tempo.
Our legs began a slow ballet
of vinelike gliding.
In the cocoon of each chest was a stirring;
we touched like twins waking in the womb.
Wind beyond the windows was unnoticed;
in the grotto of the cabin, we were snuggling
into the bed as water into moss...
in the light of guardian candles
becoming colors, touching
like sunset swimming in dark sky.

- Durant Gullick
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After the Marriage of an Unrequited Lover

All that is left is an echo of perfume...

Your love was a foregn language, a muffled art:
A shower of gold falls in an empty room.

With hidden wistfulness I watch the groom -

I who ached for the ceremony and declined the part...
Al that is left is an echo of perfume.

You'd told me you wanted me even in the womb,

And I marveled, standing curiously apart :
A shower of gold falls in an empty room.

You cross the threshold now - with a new broom,

Sweep the room clean, and make another start :
All that is left is an echo of perfume.

I could reach you even now. Or so I presume.

Would I find, becoming your counterpart,
A shower of gold falls in an empty room?

Well, you're attached and settled : Do you bloom

In the second garden, or think, with a hobbled heart,
All that is left is an echo of perfume ?

No : I think Penelope forsakes the loom,

The fire dwindles in what wa once a hearth,
A shower of gold falls in an empty room.

For I languish...and staring at embers in the gloom,

Read them like tea leaves for meanings they don't impart.
All that is left is an echo of perfume:
A shower of gold falls in an empty room.

- Durant Gullick
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The Shape of Learning

When you said you loved me, and that love was blind
to necessary hardship, your eyes shone...
but I didn't know what you meant at the time.

I thought you meant there was a grand design -

for i knew I could wait a long time on my own
when you said you loved me. And that love was blind

that my heart had carried, listening for a rhyme

now sought and cherished in each glance and tone:
but I didn't know what you meant at the time.

So I believed and waited - victimless crime,

since I was happy waiting for bread from a stone -
when you said you loved me. And that love was blind

to its effects on me : who, all the time,

grew happier - and increasingly alone,
but I didn't know. What you meant, at the time,

seemed entrancing - though dangerously undefined.

And now it seems I nust have even known
when you said you loved me ( and that love was blind )...
but I didn't know what you meant, at the time.

- Durant Gullick
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How I Make Choices

I call it magic - source of love and art

and madness -joy that dances on the peak
of loneliness and fright, excites the heart
to music, and subsumes the need to speak,
then blossoms into poem. A thousand reasons
couldn't bring me back to count the cost:
Some seeds are called by wind in chilly seasons
and take their chance at life, though most are lost.
Poverty, solitude, and boredom breed
each other, in my soul that must lie fallow.
But I endure - 'till one apparent weed
evolves a grace that makes the garden hallowed.
Still, while remembering that pain precedes,
confusion follows bursting from the womb;
I'm haunted - by an aging man, who reads
his poetry aloud in an empty room
and weeps. And that may come. The fear is deep,
yet stronger is the spirit's cataract.
I choose the apex of the flight to leap
at joy with a parachute I haven't packed.

- Durant Gullick

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Rites of Winter

Winter is dying : children are out in the park

rubbing laughter and pollen in everything,
and sometimes bumping into old men
who sit on the park benches,
immobile,
as the colonel memorialized here on his chiseled horse -
like them, unflinching at his last battle.
Children blithely climb him, as the old men watch,
motionless, eyeing his dignity,
while grass grows around their shoes.

Last month snow covered everything,

white and smooth as young skin
that thinned into a ragged coat,
and now recedes.
In a few shady recesses, a scrap of snow
is scattered here and there like a shriveled bone.
I walk through the park, remembering
my father's cleaned and emptied room,
who like this winter had seemed enending
and then was gone.

Shall I "bow and accept the end"?

All that is left of the storms is a few bent branches:
dignity and pathos holding hands.
Patches of fading snow litter the lawn
like unwanted pieces of newspaper.
Spring is here, though its pastels are mixed
with a quiet grey. And the patches of snow
are like flowers: they are little,
and to me they are like flowers
wilting...

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