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Covenant
I turn to
the airplane’s window,
away from the crowded,
padded hum,
and the mountaintops below
pull me into my breath
alone in space,
and I remember the barely visible,
gauze-screened door in a Confessional,
when I was ten, where all distance
seemed compressed, as the Rockies below
seem so
close
they are breathing with me,
as the old, deaf, Father’s breath
was the only sound in the Cathedral,
in the holy dark, in the odor
of incense, where I could feel him
claim me on behalf of the almighty
as one of the steadfast flock,
and make new again
my tiny hopeful life, cataloging
its minor transgressions – and his calm
nearness
drew
those tectonic syllables from my throat
bless me –
reawakening now in flight,
bless me Father,
summoned by how I
heard the priest breathing and knew
forgiveness was coming –
the Earth is breathing,
lifting the words and the burden
from my chest as I fill
and empty myself over the mountains –
as I fill
with vastness and empty myself
of something like sin,
empty myself
of the blindness
of walking on Earth
alone,
and I am a
rock
balanced on that closest peak,
lifted there through the movement of
geologic
plates,
oceans, and masses of world portions,
and I am
breaking,
bouncing down now, crashing,
and with every contact my breath
says tell me yourself, come, break
from yourself, join this grace of thin air,
this falling , this thrill at being pulled,
this grinding, in which you are stone, water
and slurry. Love
your body falling,
changing
with every syllable,
your deeds
fracturing from you,
bouncing
ahead into the canyons,
love the
dust of yourself that chalks
the granite arms of what you touch,
love the
creeks receiving
the sand of yourself,
love that you shall be lifted,
and folded, cracked and layered,
buried and crushed and redeemed into air,
or into space,
or some part of a sun
in a time which is yet to be conceived,
but in which
there is belief.
Terry Adams
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