rockland institute for mind body education rimbe
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About Jeanne Denney
Poems by Jeanne Denney
I am a gift to the world of deep melancholy and some strain of light
Like a lotus thread
a strange marriage of water and stone
Water runs through me like a river through a cave
the blood of estranged brothers
Like saints in a lifeboat together
or twins of deeply divergent natures paired in opposition
so am I
Out of this strain and the life I have woven of it
comes something I don't recognize:
a costume
Who knows how I float on this river of flowers with stones in my heart
how I sit in some kind of beauty as I say strange things and mean them
how I have swallowed these stones and said thank you
or lived a life in their care
without sinking
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There are certain things the heart is called to do
staying courses
loving earth
walking into fields of mercy
bearing torrents of change
In all these things there is desire
for minister, balm
companion
Where the world touches too deeply
the spirit receives its catalyst
the worm turns
there is glimmer and movement in the stone chambers
And what is called forward
cannot be predicted
To love is to risk armed angel and beast
So we crawl forward this way
not knowing which way the judgments
clawed or winged
will see it
Staking what we will on the next horse
not knowing if it is winged or cloven
Risking in brilliant illness the very bodies we have created
to know the truth
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Walking on the hot highway without proper shoes
God is walking toward you
Crawling through the damp forest floor on your belly
God arm is dangling from the vines
Sitting with the great lamp of fear burning down on you
The great lamp of God is coming from inside
Burning like a cool melancholic harp
In the corridors of ether and howling
God is beating a crazy drum of love to distract you
Through the back alley where the amputated limbs are flung
God is collecting them for your next remembering
You have called his name many times, still
God has always been answering
Isn’t it amazing when you consider how many thickets
have been cleared to reach you each day?
You think that this road is so long.
Maybe it isn’t
Maybe it’s right on the other side of where you are now
like a hound waiting, curled up
against the walls you have made like a craftsman
_____________________________________________
Morning comes
The babysitter comes
The children walk out the door trailing papers
Trailing their different worries
different memories of different wars
in half-contact with small beasts they have known
with or without lunch money
matched or unmatched
loving and hating in tender duress
the weight of all they are growing into:
their large shoes
Above them, look
The swimming fishes of their thoughts are holding small conferences
making deals with each other
The buyers and sellers are in the temple
The stinking part of me sometimes pretends to be Christ
throwing them out
It’s a mess
Ah, well
How much can I know about love in such a short time?
The swimming fishes of their thoughts factored me in long ago
as some kind of natural disaster
There are already building codes buffeting the effects of my dissolutions
And so it goes under the wide skied morning
As the many buses stop to open the many doors
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Go into the wilder spaces with me.
Light the match and burn the tether
Being normal is boring and there is so much ocean.
I have known you before.
How dear friend have you known me?
I am loving you from a deeper place in my heart now.
Even though you are still a little cheap and worried, counting your pennies
I will give this wealth of remembering to you
Because sometimes it has hurt,
but this kind of sharing has never made me poor.
_____________________________________________
Listen, this is what I have discovered in my experimenting:
40 days and nights of rain is a mess on the ground, but in the end
it means nothing.
And the longing for participation is a false tether that is leading you nowhere
You are already a part of the brilliant tapestry
Find the pulse of the sun even now,
The rain could never stop the sun from shining
Once you realize that, your life changes.
_____________________________________________
There are always six debt collectors at the door asking
when
Twice a day I go to the window and ask
when the next train is coming
It seem like years since anything has stopped here
I send small birds out the back window to them
Take this.
Is this enough?
Is this enough?
Meanwhile, inside there is a brutish man snoring
and a coffin with children dancing around it
So we live on certain days on dry crust
on fire bread, or on heart alone
On certain days like this the sadness of the family
penetrates so deeply
it almost seems to be the only real thing
even though we can imagine the truth
even though our memory serves us otherwise
even though we know that God’s red hair
might look very much like the frayed carpet
you hauled out to beat just yesterday
and that the dust cloud you see moving down the road
might well be the sisters of mercy
driving a horse, a cart full of flowers
and the mystery of your deliverance
to this porch you have swept
each day since you were a child
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Newly minted snow
laid cold, still cold
and brackens of ice
reporting all we have of heaven
the ordinary miracles:
Windows still frost in old houses
Horses still stamp in stalls
Babies still cry in the night
Stars still bear witness in blackness
And what is important to know
There is still a place to return within
this makeshift temple
Barren limbs hanging in requiem
require something of us
Listen
Make free the lamb, you lambs
Bless the maker
Bless light, air, water
the lost grass
all that is made
even here in this
our cold and snowy night.
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You can’t believe in the existence of angels
They are something that happens
like a miracle at someone else’s wedding
You can’t believe the subtlety of this love
that walks everywhere around you in such small shoes
You can’t believe motors can get so small
that wakes can get so big
that to become so large makes you invisible
(mothers know this rule)
I am a mother
still, I can’t believe it
You can’t believe how many beings of love
are present in the rocks rejoicing
Think of a mountain!
Think of you!
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I am holding a small winged thing
a new dove
a baby wren
a shaking thing with newborn lamb’s legs
rivers of infant blood are running through it
waiting for an anointment or a message
in my house I am surprised to find a different order
the order the heart brings to action
Small footsteps are new to me and
even in my husbands sighs
I hear love
My eyes are opening to graciousness
falling like spring pollen
My ears are awake to the sound of thin glass straws
some breaking
some whistling as this strange wind moving
through the hollow shafts of God’s hair
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Speak me a word that will remind me of home
Like the startling sounds of spring in early morning
the light of the full moon before Easter comes
or the sense of small things we have forgotten
pushing up in wet soil to meet sun.
It is not that winter is loveless or ungiving,
Even good Friday is a stillness we can learn to be renewed within
just time for us to remember a different kind of love
and all of our cells to learn a different word.
Yes.
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Well, it is raining and the Hassidic men wear plastic bags over their hats
while the men in the seats behind me
talk disrespectfully about women
dirty comments
and I feel like I hate New York
I feel like I have swallowed something I haven’t understood
that has transformed me disfigured
I feel like a pauper
With my husband I have shared my wealth
In him it became concrete
We have eaten because of this unique wedding
With my husband I have shared my wealth and my pebbles
we have eaten them
I say, we have eaten them and become
we have eaten them and become disfigured, transformed, tatooed,
inundated like lice in a flood, paddling
With my husband I have shared my death
found the limits of my generosity
I have found the strange marriage of meal, water and heat
We have baked a cake, a porridge
Here is your spoon
In this dry place of udders, my marriage is baking
and I am full of sadness for the world
its strangeness
the strangeness of the city with the myriad naïve corruptions and foul glances
with the innocence of evil hanging loosely, cloud-like in the haze brought about
by the moving automobiles
I am hating them for the stupidity of this fornication
for the cheap amusements just as dark
and I have no compassion today because I am sick of compassion
I am sick of holding the space for tears in a place without them
New York
you are awash
with the fermented angers of your ants and pigeons
and now I have given you my children
to grow up in you proudly
I do not understand the engine of your waste
how many forms this rage makes in just one day
I am not sure where to find the road to sanctity
how to set up the blessed manger on this ground
whether hate or love is housed in your great bosom
or what is housed in mine
here,
living meagerly within you
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They have held me like a piper, piping
They hold me like a fiddler, playing
against the fatigue of a dancing dragon to dawn
fatigue with anger and desperation in it
is an old story
I don’t march against it
The daily theft becomes a simple tax
Something carried in buried flames
The captor of the self is agony, saying
“Sing us the songs of Zion”
This is a strange harp with horsehair strings
there is a cross on it to catch tears
there is a puppeteer, a master of ceremonies
a ghost of semi-colons shouting in the alley wind
“There is more than this!”
There is more than blood and bone dancing
in small pointed shoes through the mornings of despair
more than the eyes of lost calves
there are cranes with trumpets flying over the woods
there are telephones ringing in parks
and someone at a distance waiting for an answer
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This homing pigeon of my heart takes its natural course to the south.
The possibility of joy and the reality of it moving
wings flapping
and restless to find its owner.
When the cascade of blessings come,
What good is your thimble or your cup?
You take off your clothes and swim
Swallowing as much as you can before meeting land
Where you must walk again.
How is it that I came to love with so much longing and so much hatred?
How is it that we arrived broken-hearted to earth and
Finding ourselves with only a pickaxe and a remnant of desire,
Have made this life?
But look around,
Admire the work of brilliant tenacity in the eyes of your neighbor.
There are no exceptions to this brilliance.
You may as well stop constructing your schemes and your hierarchies
and know the way that this is.
You want to find joy in this life while you are living?
I have finally found the secret:
A hundred
A million time a day say thank you to God.
Even in the grocery store lines.
Even when you are paying your bills.
Even when your children wreck your cars
and the tree falls, hitting your house.
A hundred
A million time a day say thank you to God.
That should do it.
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So here is a word for the joy of life: Repent
the hour is at hand.
You think that I am kidding, but really
in that ecstasy is repentance.
Stubborn sinner that I am, I have lived in the raven’s clutches
a long time spitting at God.
And now, exhausted, found wanting, unable to kick any longer
I have collapsed into those arms, defeated
and strangely willing to participate
even to write this,
which is my joy
becoming voice
And you friend,
Where is yours?
