A cathedral can only imitate the trees
that spoke light like extinct language
in the John Muir Woods.
A strange entrance into joy,
these hymns sung by ancient voices,
where certain words were understood —
the scent of wood decayed by heat,
light on water,
lichen facing thin shadows —
and beyond it all
the sweet intoning of something
older than a psalm.
I climbed and I saw spider webs
stretched over young ferns,
tapestried to reveal
a history of roots and fronds
that faced small sunlight beneath the trees
millennia before human beings
ever thought to pray.
God was purely in that day.
Not glimpsed down the aisle of a nave —
just God, unexplained.
I have tried a reprise on other days.
I have walked in other woods
but never seen the mute, tangled truth
that rose to meet me on that day,
a pattern that I try to imitate
with poems and paintings and orisons,
and long to find in stained light —
a pattern beyond song and sight.
I love the beauty of a church,
even though I know
that I pray and bend my knees
within a facsimile space —
that it is hard to see the God I taste.
God seems withdrawn beyond
the reach of light,
or hidden in steepled heights,
or in an earth below the earth.
And I am always restless now —
I always seek, am seldom found.
