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Lean-To

(x = space)

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Lean-To

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Earth tilts

Unlike pinball

The other way

Then tilts

The other way

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We light fires

To appease

So that the axis

Listens

Turns us back

To growing seasons

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We’ll have winter

Now

While they have

Summer

The world is made

Of complements

As well as

Paradox

Winter summer,

Equator and the poles

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A world on which

All things hold

That must hold

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Our home

Embraces opposites

In seasons

In tilting one way

Then the other

In value for us all

And each one

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C L Couch

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Sunrise in Iceland 11:19 this morning.

Hafsteinn Robertsson from Hafnarfjordur, Iceland – Winter Solstice, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73751614

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An Appointment with God

(x = space)

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An Appointment with God

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I don’t’ have so many appointments

Lately,

For which I’m grateful

In a time of my kind of PTSD,

It’s the weight of stressors

I don’t have to bear

So much

x

To get there

To show up on time

To be here when I’m called

To have everything I

Might be needing

Relieved of this

Makes for a better day

x

I’d like to live easy

I don’t have much

But to have time

And on the flip side

Lack of bother

On the A side

Coffee and toast

And morning

And a day for you

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Someday will arrive

I keep forgetting

You will arrive

To take me to home

By then,

Maybe I shall be glad

Meanwhile, I keep my faith

With me and then I

Hope with

The Amish

Who say, one by one,

I hope so

When asked about assurance

Of salvation

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C L Couch

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I think it was the poet Julia Kasdorf, as I may have said before, who told me about the typical response when Amish are asked the salvific question.

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Waves

Photo by Bernd Dittrich on Unsplash

Frankreich

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Gaze

(x = space)

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Gaze

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Give me a

Small piece of Earth

For a while

With dust swept in the corner

Without perfection

A hard floor

Some stones for walls

A ledge from which to look

While I can look

Out upon, well,

Everything you’ve made

And the uneasy alliance

You have with

Your creatures

Maybe all of them

Certainly the ones who

Made it out of Eden

Not unscathed

And how much we took with us

No one knows for now

And it’s been a while

And in this place

I’ll ponder you

And us

And our place with each other

In the grander scheme

Of things,

Which for now is

Still a guess

Though sometimes

We think we’re getting closer

But I won’t care about conclusions

Rather the sacraments

In each moment

Normal, mortal

Materials

Turned

Taken inside

To serve a spiritual purpose

However far

A thought of you

And us

Might take us

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C L Couch

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The Sacrament of the Present Moment by Jean-Pierre de Caussade

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Photo by Brigi Uhrin on Unsplash

Budapest, Budapest, Magyarország

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Second Book of Genesis

(x = space)

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Second Book of Genesis

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God kept saying

That it’s good

Creation’s good

Each day of it

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To be there

Hear the names

Have God speak into our minds

In pre-fall grace

With understanding

There is delight

And faith

In all this

Without they’re being named

Only the day and night

All the animals

Us

And then a time of rest

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If we had been there

If we could have touched their hands

And drawn them back

From the tree

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C L Couch

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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

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Earth Day

(x = space)

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Earth Day

(2021)

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And

With Earthlings there

Is a relationship

Dysfunctional and thus

Destructive,

So say

All the tops of trees

Burned

By acid rain

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Earth survives

As it may

And sometimes must

Fight back

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We’re only guessing

But with all the metal satellites

Surrounding,

You’d think we’d know

Earth better than

To ruin it

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Yet we must ask

Victims of hurricanes:

The storm,

The flood that

Take one’s own

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Earth was no friend,

And who is with them

Now?

Earth and Earthers,

I can only hope

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Source of pleasure

Source of pain

(source of profit)

It is our world,

Though we eye another

It is our microcosm

And an old,

Old story

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Moon who watches,

Heaven beyond,

Hell below,

Ten circles in the center

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Everything we know

In the

Cosmic narrative

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Maybe it’s time

To release Cartesian

Orientation,

Since lines really

Do not hold down anything

And are twisted when

New encounters

Overthrow

The old

(which is

discovery)

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Time

To like the Earth

Again and like it better

We should know how

By now

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C L Couch

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Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

Satellite over the coast.

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The Devil in the Middle

(x = space)

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The Devil in the Middle

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What is in

The center of it all?

A devil laughing?

Why should a devil

Laugh?  Why should

A devil care?

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Devil-may-care,

What does that mean?

It means cavalier

In this instance;

Cavalier meaning gallant,

Gallant meaning piquant

Small matters

To the devil

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Some imply a drama:

The devil made an angel,

Risen through the rank

To be chief angel

Even over arches

The prince of light

In the maker’s eye

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Then came ambition

There must be more

(there isn’t

there is),

A form of pride

Borrowed from the will

The maker gave

The last things made,

Before resting

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Pride made or given,

The angel rises

Now to have something

Of its own,

The will to chase the universe

To know

And thus have

Everything that moves—

Better yet, motion itself

And heat

And all reactions,

The moving in everything

That moves

x

The universe is not

Statuary;

I will own dynamos

All that makes possible

All else—this

Is ambition

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And the maker,

The maker said no

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Other than the tree,

The first time

That was said

More so imposed,

And the devil knew

The maker meant it

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And there was howling,

The first kind

Ever heard in heaven

And rebellion

And rejection

As decreed

In the moment before

And in between

Anything beyond the host

Was made

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The devil thought

Nothing like this could apply

To an angel

Better than archangels—

But this was meant,

It knew and so

It and its own followers

Must leave,

The devil

And the devil’s own

Sliding onto Earth

In a compromise, it hoped,

Of creation’s creating,

Maker’s binding law

Not to destroy in victory

Anything that was made,

Even with

Accounting the defeated

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Earth the great place

In between,

Where battles might be fought

Until the last engagement;

The devil knew it all

And didn’t care—there

Were its own skirmishes to win,

A campaign of turning

And, turned enough,

To ruin Eden’s darlings

Even turn the animals

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Twisting the good

In molecules

And lightning

And all forces remade

Into viscous virtue,

Easy to remake

And redirect,

Blurring the vision of the end

Even in its sight—

Maybe the devil and an army

Of the Earth

Will split the maker’s love

And all will overthrown,

New laws

With everything its own

With what might be taken

From each other

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All anarchies,

All chaos

Water will not fill the shape

Of its container

For physics overthrown

With anything agreed-upon

Undone

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Undo it all,

The devil owning energy

Would win

And have its own,

More than any other

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Enough of a plan

To ruin Eden’s promises

Then go from there

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C L Couch

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x

there is more

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Photo by Jonathan Bean on Unsplash

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Writing Us

(x = space)

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Writing Us

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I suppose

We have to talk about ourselves

Each utterance an unwilling

Biography

I want to hear your story

And in the electron universe I do,

And I am thankful

x

I hope that you are well

I hope that God protects you

Via angels

Or the arrival of a cathartic,

Gentler day

Then when inner wind’s inhaled

Back to the fray

That is the rest of today

Into tomorrow

x

So I might hear,

Inshallah,

And you tell me

Tell us all

So we might breathe

For sharing

And consider this community

With certain anonymities

Withstanding

x

Talk to me

I can talk back

Unless listening

In the quiet space between us

Is better

For the call

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C L Couch

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Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

Drops

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The Book of Numbers

(x = space)

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The Book of Numbers

(in pandemic time)

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Lots of twos and ones

Tomorrow

And a zero,

And there could be church:

I think I’d cherish

Learning someone else’s

Story

If in a cyber way

x

To understand

How a narrative fits

Into the weaving,

The puzzle

Of the one great story

In which we each

Have a page

x

Monochrome

Or colorful

Burnt along the edges,

Gilded for the saints

After all the torn-up

Parts have been

Repaired

x

Not a book of judgment

Not a cache of

Clever evidence;

Rather the story of us

In part

And all the rest of us

And God inside, above

With tired angels

Tirelessly binding

Fixing binding

All the time

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C L Couch

(for 2/21/2021)

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Photo by Paulius Dragunas on Unsplash

Antelope Canyon, United States

Ladder to Nowhere

(reasonable skeptic)

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Tomorrow Should Be Much Like Today

(x = space)

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Tomorrow Should Be Much Like Today

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I don’t know what to say

Am I confused?

Perhaps

I mean, I try to write every day

Not because I have to

Or because of a tontine

Between poets, as the

Romantics tried

Though they wrote with form

And complex thought

And feeling

Typically, I end up with

More than one thing

And I choose

x

Sometimes I surprise myself

And choose the thing

I wasn’t planning on

(as things came out)

And publish that

I’d say discovery is fun,

And it is

Though it is surprise

Becomes the main thing

When it happens

I suppose they go together

Discovery and surprise

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I write based on

What’s happening in the world

And inside me

And if I haven’t thought of

Something spiritual, then

I guide my thoughts that way,

Which sounds forced

Well, maybe a contrivance

Again, I try to keep discovery

In the mixture, as a baker

Or mixologist might see it

Prayer, Bible, interrogative—I try

To take up problems

And solutions

Or else things that matter

In a smaller, more day-to-day way

Where we live

With our souls and God

Trying to know each other,

Eke out a life together

x

There is community

I’m aware of

Maybe matching something like

Thornton Wilder’s echelons

That Rebecca recounts—you know,

Citizen of Earth and such

I am Robin,

Living in a house

Along a street that’s old and busy

In the small town (borough) of

Mechanicsburg

In the commonwealth of Pennsylvania,

One of the MidAtlantic states

In the U.S.A. (a country without

its own good name

because America is also

north and south

of us),

Living in the northern hemisphere

And the western as well,

Underneath the moon that

Orbits ‘round my planet

x

I am a citizen of Earth,

The third planet from our sun

In a system of nine or eight planets

(we’re still arguing about the

count, though I’ve thought

since I was a child about

another planet out there

to make the system ten or nine)

But, anyway,

A member of my solar system

In a spiral galaxy

Called the Milky Way

With another galaxy called

Andromeda by us—I don’t know what

The folk out there might

Call themselves—nearby,

Galactically speaking

And there’s the mind of God

By God’s own hand

How we were made and how

We’re sustained,

Despite the agenda of human greed that

Would rather have its own way

x

I believe in Jesus

Others await Messiah

Others live in Messiah

Others own Muhammad,

The prophet and the teachings–and

There are those who

Follow the Buddha

And those who want the Hindu

Godhead

And still others who follow other ways

With other entities and names

For God

And those who follow none

And I have to say

I do not mind, which makes for bad

Evangelism but also makes for

Respectful living

And I figure we need respect

More than singularity for now

Otherwise, we might not exist

To have all the arguments

About belief

Or lack thereof

That should only happen

In congenial ways,

Not with life on the line

For anyone

Believing, not believing

x

And so I’m done for now,

This day

It is autumn, my favorite season

For the thrill of cold

With the presence of new colors

That, to me, make everything

More interesting

I like the other seasons, too,

Happy to have them all

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C L Couch

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Our Town by Thornton Wilder.  The dialogue referred to happens near the end of Act 1.

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By Philipp Salzgeber – http://salzgeber.at/astro/pics/9703293.html, CC BY-SA 2.0 at, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=184641

Hale–Bopp in 1997

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