What Knees Are For, An Advent Letter From One Desert To Another - To An Old Philosopher In Rome Poem by Warren Falcon

for Hank

'Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself in the end.' - Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

'We make no claim to include anything of the past in the present but to maintain in the present the actuality of the eternal.'
- Jacques Maritain

1
Old Friend, from one desert to another,

let other scholars of absence break
their burden-heads against these mute
stones. The cactus here, perhaps knowing
of your advent by post, has waited all
these years to come into its radiance
with you. Just tonight it blooms once
only in its life, a miracle itself, a startle,
one blossom of rarified hope.

Distant cousin,

you unveil too in Roman darkness there as
we once shared silent prayer in the churchyard,
our knees on hard stones, our God then, our
thin books not yet written.

One simple stone veils you where you rest,
your books, long in the making, shoulder the
burden so faithfully carried without complaint,
a landscape scarred, life's hard impress etched
upon you now framed, placed beside the new
flower, sheer and here.

I wonder how you are now that you are prayer itself
on that hill of bones wet with penitent pilgrims tears.

Your photograph travels all these years to
reach me so long without news of you, my
letters unanswered though rumors stiil stray
in from the same old rivals fed on envy inquiring
after you.

I never bother to answer them.

Icy morning's postman angel at the gate,
has firmly placed in my hands your parcel
of plain brown paper,

ROMA

proclaims in bold print framed
beside the other framed, dear

Unexpected Face.

To see you at last, your resigned smile finally,
gladly, admitting surrender - such repose is
an altar where incomprehension finally breaks
into blossom - Emptiness is Presence Divined
in any landscape, or ocean. Or mind.

On the back of your photo you ask simply,
briefly, a note scribbled by a weak hand,

How fare's you,
God's mason friend?

2
I stammer on scraping skin and song,
a geography myself, a landscape severe,
gone in the nose and ears, eyes good
now for shadows only. And some old
beloved words. But I'll plead allergies.

I am reading some dead Thomists
these days, Maritain, your friend,
whom I've secretly adored since
covenants were broken, my own
fault, asking again and again how
one can keep covenant with self
much less a God.

Bless my bones, if there are blessings
for such. I've taken them for granted
much. They are my formation base.
I've wasted years chasing the world,
the words for things, the 'why and
how', never really thought of bones
but old Thomists did and do, even
Calvinist, too, though they're way too
dry for me.

Maritain frees me, as does his wife,
the gentleness in them both astounds.
Jacques's a tough bird, though, an
intellect staking claim on thought and
what perhaps it ought to do with silly
human will once Divinity has entered
the room -

What knees are for upturned palms can plead.

NOW

sings bones

their old hymns ongoing theme.

Somewhere I read, or did I dream,
there's an old heresiarch in the desert
to cultivate a life of prayer in nowhere.
After all the years of abstention and
heat, the bare land inexorable, he
can no longer utter much at all,
speechless before severity, and
beauty, how his eternal question
sums a remaindered prayer:

'Heres breath for you.'