splinters of fire

Having a child has done a lot to muddy the steel trap of my mind--if I ever had such a thing to begin with. My mental edge has long gone soft. Last week, running up the street to get our car out of the garage, I heard the subway train pull out of station on the track below the street, and I thought, "oh no! my car is leaving without me!" It took a moment to remind myself that unlike the subway, privately owned cars do not actually take off without their passengers. I remembered then the time when I was in high school, when my mother was telling us about something that had happened in an elevator, when she corrected herself and said, "whoops, not alligator, I meant to say elevator" and I replied, "But, Mom, you did say elevator!"

Perhaps motherhood, or merely being somewhat muddled, could be viewed as an asset. That is, reason--at least the steel trap version--can be, as Levertov says, "toxic in large quantities." These days I sometimes wish I had a bit more of this toxicity, but I am ever appreciative of the ways muddledom brings God closer. Splinters of fire, indeed.


C O N T R A B A N D

by Denise Levertov

The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.
That's why the taste of it
drove us from Eden. That fruit
was meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder
for use a pinch at a time, a condiment.
God had probably planned to tell us later
about this new pleasure.

We stuffed our mouths full of it

gorged on but and if and how and again

but, knowing no better.

It's toxic in large quantities; fumes

swirled in our heads and around us

to form a dense cloud that hardened to steel,

a wall between us and God, Who was Paradise,

Not that God is unreasonable—but reason

in such excess was tyranny

and locked us into its own limits, a polished cell

reflecting our own faces. God lives

on the other side of the mirror,

but through the slit where the barrier doesn't

quite touch the ground, manages still

to squeeze in—as filtered light,

splinters of fire, a strain of music heard

then lost, than heard again.

{ Poetry Wednesday }