In purest song one plays the constant fool 
As changes shimmer in the inner eye. 
I stare and stare into a deepening pool 
And tell myself my image cannot die. 
I love myself: that?s my one constancy. 
Oh, to be something else, yet still to be! 


Sweet Christ, rejoice in my infirmity; 
There?s little left I care to call my own. 
Today they drained the fluid from a knee 
And pumped a shoulder full of cortisone; 
Thus I conform to my divinity 
By dying inward, like an aging tree. 


The instant ages on the living eye; 
Light on its rounds, a pure extreme of light 
Breaks on me as my meager flesh breaks down? 
The soul delights in that extremity. 
Blessed the meek; they shall inherit wrath; 
I?m son and father of my only death. 


A mind too active is no mind at all; 
The deep eye sees the shimmer on the stone; 
The eternal seeks, and finds, the temporal, 
The change from dark to light of the slow moon, 
Dead to myself, and all I hold most dear, 
I move beyond the reach of wind and fire. 


Deep in the greens of summer sing the lives 
I?ve come to love. A vireo whets its bill. 
The great day balances upon the leaves; 
My ears still hear the bird when all is still; 
My soul is still my soul, and still the Son, 
And knowing this, I am not yet undone. 


Things without hands take hands: there is no choice,? 
Eternity?s not easily come by. 
When opposites come suddenly in place, 
I teach my eyes to hear, my ears to see 
How body from spirit slowly does unwind 
Until we are pure spirit at the end.