"while i lay, i'd dream we're better, scales were gone and faces lighter."

- Jars of Clay

I think it's become an informal tradition for me to post a poem on a Sunday. It's certainly not one that I mind, at least not for now. We will see if I continue posting poems post-Orvieto, or, I suppose, even whether I continue blogging post-Orvieto. I love Louise Gluck a lot; she was one of the first poets I ever really found. I say that, but I certainly haven't finished the finding process yet. In re-reading her book The Wild Iris last semester (a full year and a half after I was first introduced to it), I found out that all of my favorite poems are also, among other things, pretty blatantly related to sex. So I'm a little self-conscious posting them now (as much because of my failure to realize that particular dimension for so long as anything else I suppose). But I think "Vespers" is a fairly safe poem, and a very good one for a Sunday:

Vespers

I don't wonder where you are anymore.
You're in the garden; you're where John is,
in the dirt, abstracted, holding his green trowel.
This is how he gardens: fifteen minutes of intense effort,
fifteen minutes of ecstatic contemplation. Sometimes
I work beside him, doing the shade chores,
weeding, thinning the lettuces; sometimes I watch
from the porch near the upper garden until twilight makes
lamps of the first lilies: all this time,
peace never leaves him. But it rushes through me,
not as sustenance the flower holds,
but like bright light through the bare tree.