sw00426pind-prayer33

December 31: New Year's Eve 


Year's end.  And mistakes I have made,
of whatever size and strength they have been,
set my inner left ear gurgling
like water boiling deep in a well;
curl inside my stomach wall
a distant ache;
open in the bone of my upper left arm
a space whirling with a damp wind.

Year's end: pulsebeats not for counting:
particular patterns and places of them
layered with knowledge
sometimes hard to peel,
sometimes hard to learn from.

Still, the attempt;
still resolutions without understandings.
Little's changed.

Year's end.  And three crows flap
from a sleeping oak;
and my spirit stands
on a high granite rock,
viewing before, and now, and to come,
and waiting for the vitamin light and mineraled waters
to feed and test
the hidden wisdoms gathered by a heart
at another raucous, another somber
year's end.





Brian A. J. Salchert                  

sw00425pind-prayer32

December 30


If the butterfly had dipped to the
left instead of to the right,
the swallow would have missed it

and the well-dressed man
watching from the clovered knoll
would not have remembered

those irretrievable moments when,
his wit outwitted by a circumstance,
he was stript of his natty pride.





-
Brian A. J. Salchert                  

sw00424pind-prayer31

December 29


Magnificence (cities, castles, cathedrals
of imagination) deepens, encourages, inspires.

Magnificence (winds, waters, land shapes
of imagination) deepens, encourages, inspires.

Magnificence (faith, hope, love
in imagination) deepens, encourages, inspires.

Through the nerve routes of human creation,
the nerve routes of nature,
the nerve routes of spirit;
through the air ways of human creation,
the air ways of nature,
the air ways of spirit;
through the blood lines of human creation,
the blood lines of nature,
the blood lines of spirit,

magnificence, magnificence, magnificence.





~
Brian A. J. Salchert                  

sw00423pind-prayer30

December 28


When the guest asked: 
"Have you ever been burned?"
I answered:
"Yes"--
but did not heed him well enough.

So when they talked me into
opening the pool--
those two from     a wedding-party group--
I did not double-lock the drawer.

While I was gone
swift knowledge used
to slide it out,
and all the tens and all the twenties
(one hundred thirty dollars worth)
flew from there.

Foxes, cats; and one dead bunny.


[  2007-05-17  ~ 
   There does exist
   a two-part story
   preceding this story
   which somewhat explains
   the why of this one,
   but it's in a place
   that's double-locked. ]





-
Brian A. J. Salchert                  

sw00422pind-prayer29

December 27


In the long night
the long day
resounds--
a rainbow of odors,
a taster's delight of textures,
and ever-changing pulsebeat of remembrances.

When we near an end,
its beginning always returns.

Every moment
involved with every other.
Every space.

Ecology:
of the universe,
of the mind.

The discovery of a cecropia
resplendent in the sun,
the vision of a coasting Snowy Owl.





-
Brian A. J. Salchert                  

sw00421pind-prayer28

December 26


Balancing the day that would not balance--
as there were errors in the rooms,
in the restaurant, in the lounge;
errors in the debits and the credits;
errors in the balances picked up--
my attention is disrupted 
by our other Brian,
and my wonder caught by Polaroid
for his album of employees, guests, and patrons
of this Holiday Inn-West Bend.
My attention scribbles off
to vague, unsolvable dreams.

Labor, recreation, relaxation:
fitful though they are:

I give,
and am given.

Down a highway glare with freezing rain
we safely travel home.





-
Brian A. J. Salchert                  

sw00420pind-prayer27

Christmas Day: During


And let your gifts be inexpensive
but rich with meaning.

And let your gifts be small
with large souls.

This starship
you inhabit
will reward you.

From your trudging against a blizzard
up an unfamiliar road,
a searcher on a snowmobile
will rescue you.





-
Brian A. J. Salchert                  

sw00419pind-prayer26

Christmas Day: Dawn


Hidden from us
by a shell of clouds,
the flashing sun
floats higher and higher
from the Eastern trees.

The mansion's acres
kept sacred
by a steel fence,
its owners' dogs cannot
tear our hands.

Led inward
by imaginings,
the senses
curl 
to sleep.

Her silence
is their prayer.
His watchfulness
their lantern
in the cave.





-
Brian A. J. Salchert                  

sw00418pind-prayer25

Christmas Day: Midnight


Father Creator,
In the name of Your Son, Jesus,
whose birth this day we celebrate,
congratulations.

As the margins of oceans with the margins of lands applaud;
as winds with the leaves of trees applaud,
so now my spirit with my flesh applauds.

In one place strings of stars
give voice to this night;
in another place shakings of snow.





-
Brian A. J. Salchert                  

sw00417pind-prayer24

   [ As to the following, be skeptical.  Do your own research. ]


December 24: Christmas Eve


Sitting in my parents' living room,
I am attracted to the voice of another:

Do you want to hear a good one?
Before the Second World War
the DuPonts built factories in Germany
which were used by the Nazis
to make bombs directed against our men
and profits for the DuPonts,
factories which were then bombed by our pilots,
an act because of which
the DuPonts sued the United States,
and so profited both ways.  Traitors.

Ill-used money.  Ill-wed power.  The death of men.

Watching my parents' television,
I turn to the voice of Golda Meir.

I can't see how the PLO
can be called a liberation movement.
It's not.
It's a terrorist movement.  * . . . .
How can you argue with people
who want you to die.

In the hands of the greedy the earth's living green
burns to brown:
gills and lungs collapse.





-
Brian A. J. Salchert                  

sw00416pind-prayer23

December 23


Soon,
like Jesus of Nazareth,
I
may
be killed
because I am different
and am not afraid
to say so.

   [ 2007-05-16:
   Delete, delete: too paranoid; too confessional.
   Okay.  Proceed.  Examples follow. ]

So you: Black, Red, Brown, Yellow, White.

So you: Atheist, Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem, Jew, Christian.

So you: woman, man.

So you.

We are each
of minorities
who must assuage and counter and bear with
the tyrannies of majorities
and each other;
who, though often lost
in the forests of our whims and demands,
must contemplate       the trilliums of hope.





-
Brian A. J. Salchert                  

sw00415pind-prayer22

December 22


Having missed today,
I come back to it
from the day after

with just enough faith
to give it a chapel
with a mellow bell.




~
Brian A. J. Salchert                  

sw00414pind-prayer21

December 21


Icy snowflakes
on the windows of our van--

a morning of
glassware branches--

we're wondering
to church.





-
Brian A. J. Salchert                  

sw00413pind-prayer20

December 20


Lord, Person Supreme,
forgive me for my forgetfulness

of those I have gamed with
and half-an-hour later no longer known,

and those close acquaintances of a year or more
whose names, if not faces, will not return;

the memory You have given me, good,
is neither always quick nor long;

so, I try to accept it, hoping
that through these words I may/ a tad atone

for its hurtful, embarrassing faults;
and in one small way again bless--

or in more than one way:
like the notes of a moving song,

the sparklings of snow on a pine,
the delicate highs in a fern.





-
Brian A. J. Salchert                  

sw00412pind-prayer19

December 19


The Tibetan Book of the Dead,
a version of the Holy Bible,

The Works of Shakespeare,
a translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy,

Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man,
Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God,

J. Bronowski's The Ascent of Man,
Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics,

Isaac Asimov's Guide to Science,
George B. Leonard's The Transformation,

James Joyce's Ulysses,
Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago,

Thorton Wilder's The Eighth Day,
J. H. Plumb's In the Light of History,

Carl Sagan's The Cosmic Connection,
Carl Jung's Man and His Symbols,

Whitman's Leaves of Grass,
Studs Terkel's Working,

Barbara Ward's 5 Ideas that Change the World,
Nancy Wilson Ross's Three Ways of Asian Wisdom,

Alberto Moravia's Man as an End,
C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man,

Richard Holmes' Shelley: The Pursuit,
Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition,

Karl Hess's Dear America,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago,

Northrup Frye's The Educated Imagination,
Edward Dahlberg's Can These Bones Live,

Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind:

a selection of some the books I own or have borrowed:

a naming of some of the best prayers
I may ever have the sacred delight to somewhat say.





-
Brian A. J. Salchert                  

sw00411pind-prayer18

December 18


And what is a prayer anyhow?
What more than the sense
of something new
or something old
newly entered.




~
Brian A. J. Salchert                  

sw00410pind-prayer17

December 17


Today the winds
whine near zero
through the windows
of our homes.

In the abandoned sky
the abandoned nest
in the abandoned tree
sticks like a stone.

Sitting together
we sit apart:
you in your book;
me in my poem.





-
Brian A. J. Salchert                  

sw00409pind-prayer16

December 16: for Emily Dickinson


Utopias are impossible,
but do not cease to dream.
The only ways our spirits grow
are mixed of joy and pain.

If I should walk an unkown path
and catch a bramble wrong,
sure I'd curse before I'd laugh--
let thunderstorms hide the sun.

If I were to take a foreign street;
get pummeled, raped, knifed,
I still would strike for the good in me
in my sudden enemy's life.

Fool in this; fool in that;
fool with words, with hearts:
to the purest religion, the purest math,
to the providential stars.




~
Brian A. J. Salchert                  

sw00408pind-prayer15

December 15


In the robin's egg
the philosopher's dreams
lose all shape and substance

and in the fateful tongues of lightnings
whose lashings sting to kill,
all power and direction;

in the resilient fragile wonder
of human prayer
the ripe fruit of forking wood.





-
Brian A. J. Salchert                  

sw00407pind-prayer14

[ Other than "The First Sunday of Advent" (which was in 1974),
   my original copy does not mention day names; but it does note
   that 1975 was the year of the December 14 (which was also a
   Sunday) prayer, implying that I penned the remaining prayers
   in 1975.  Even though I cannot prove this, I am accepting it. ] 




December 14: Sunday (1975)


Letters.  Mine.  The copies I have.
If I were to read them over again,
I would be appalled by the uneasiness
with which so many of them were written,
the overblown rhetoric there,
the false pride.

How is it possible
I can consider myself at all
to be half as blessed
as even a Shelley or an Auden
to say nothing of a Shakespeare or a Whitman
when such an abject crowd of letters
exists to denounce me?

Certainly the important critics and editors of this moment
have not praised my poems especially,
if indeed they have chanced to read them;
but how can I expect them to
who himself--?
..................... Letters.  Mine.
Promethean, Hephaestean, ashen.

So also my poems.  Read them.
What delights you, keep.
What disturbs you, consider.
What your best critical intelligence tells you
was poorly made, condemn. 





-
Brian A. J. Salchert