Tapping the Wall

by Christopher Raley

 

Grey clouds puzzled together

in jagged edges move

slowly north by the delta’s

insistent wind.

 

They cross the street

in silence aloft

and filter unneighborly light

on yellow lawns, soggy

 

and spongy with rain.

Muddy trails both shine

and are dark where dogs

pace the yard and sniff

 

through warped fences.

Smears of black composition

of leaves I never raked

touch the air with decay.

 

Ornaments and lights droop

in the street-front tree

this last week of January.

A car backs out of a driveway,

 

comes slowly down the street.

The only sound for miles

rolls ever lighter

out of kindness.

by Christopher Raley

 

Street light on faithless concrete

and the smell of salt in fog

resurrect in sound and linking chords

of a twenty-seven year old song.

 

A pagan chapel in the hills, and the groom wore sandals.

We laughed through hymns to mother earth

and grimaced at the Hallelujah Chorus

six of us sang while the party strutted out.

 

Earlier in the morning ruthless winds

blew over lower Berkeley, and we saw

what happens when hope flattens to

painted walls, cheap hotels and ugly diners.

 

So when that song plays its cynical pictures of betrayal

and love ending, I see, in the night before the wedding,

a dark hotel room flanked by a drifter’s alley.

 

Traffic always spreads rumors of movement:

the telltale chorus of the city.

by Christopher Raley

i

You have said the righteous is like a tree

planted in a garden by a river.

Your river runs its course from spring to ocean

carving its slow and deep mark in the earth;

 

rushing its way through the wild lands,

stone gorges and meadows painfully green;

looping back and forth the valley like a string

in frozen fall to the mouth at the sea.

 

Where the river is most deep and slow

channels divert to water Your trees

and surround them as far as they might grow.

 

They grow tall from Your care and their roots

entangle for theirs is not to journey.

But the world passes by scoffing under their shade.

 

ii

You have taken them from across the world.

Uprooted from their native soil,

planted in this foreign sanctuary,

strangers by instinct, they grow together.

 

The Banksia Rose creeps her sinewed vines

round the rough branches of the ancient oak;

the gray smoothed trunk of the Honey Locust

patient behind the swaying Jerusalem Thorn.

 

Such coexistence not found in nature

You make a habitat in Your garden

that enforests, for on it no bounds are set.

 

Where once there was barren land, the elm gently

‘clines across the bamboo straight of the ground

that resonates to the footsteps of God.

 

iii

They speak, these of the congregation,

as the wind moves unseen when it comes,

only heard as each one is touched by it,

and looked for when it leaves the garden silent.

 

Then it stirs the maple, leaves like a wave

under its touch rustle down words to stillness.

The wind gone again, then appears below

where, distant, the anxious elm flutters.

 

The bird stares from limbs not her own.

The rattle snake coils up and waits

among the pruned branches and starving weeds

 

and parched soil sifts in from out like sand

until the wind, gathered up, drives these gone

and the trees groan among themselves and sing.

 

iv

You have said the righteous is like a tree

planted in a garden by a river.

The world passes by and they wonder:

Who are these that stand like guards of no gold?

 

They are silent.  Then they speak but not words

understandable to natural ears.

They are still.  Then they move as if by force.

They are deaf, but silence is like hearing.

 

The world mocks, the world laughs: the world.

But Your river runs from spring to ocean

and in the slow and deep You are there.

 

The roots of Your trees emerge from the bank

to take more urgently what nurtures them,

and they lean out to shade what saves them.

by Christopher Raley

 

I remember him

on stage alone with the witness

of wood and wire plucked.

The darkness upheld his voice,

and his words stood

in the stillness around my tongue.

by Christopher Raley

 

The pages of her Bible are as grey

as her fingers, as soft and as tired.

The tremor of her hand carries through

the frail membranes as she turns them over.

 

Or does it flow the other way?

Words shiver startling decades old underlining,

frightening scribbled thoughts

to rub their backs against her failing skin.

 

Her hands smooth the pages spread open

on a dying man’s bed as if she craves

in the softest spot of palms the breath of God

from behind the lips of what veils Him.

by Christopher Raley

 

He said to her, I wish I was a painter

shaping light to touch it, and she took him

at his word and gave him her eyes peering

as over the edge of a wall, so he saw

 

no smile save what shone in pupils.

He mixed her hues a shade deep enough

to grace canvass, and made it his lover.

But when its stillness hurt him, he left it

 

and set loneliness to drive the narrow road

through blinkless dark—headlights like tunnels—

to meet dawn in the cold harbored forest.

 

He sat at the pavement’s edge where the sun behind

sponged with green the meadow before and changed

by shades the impossible stone of mountains.