The Infinite Closeness of the Sky: Two Poems by Jenny Gillespie Mason

The Blue

Vast jewel of the sky above the rooftop hospital parking lot.
Those who insist You are not here—how then justify the blue?

Krishna in its blue, so blatantly divine. Just look up!

Man in his vehicle on his way down the ramp—
woman smacking a phone into her child’s hands—

that thought of how to turn the day to their advantage, where it comes from,
not from their own clever selves, but clinging, rhythmic Nature.

But these are just my thoughts high on their own sound,
their callous intel. Rarer is the inlet to wonder about the Other

who fails to transcend into a Thou-artist during the blood draw,
who leaves her own humiliating procedure, shrugs off the sky.

And why?
Because of all the little sadnesses of her life…

And what I didn’t say, shaking them like little dolls
to see the blue, was all week it was a gradual cutting down,

with God as the new cup. Then after the fasting that was its own
fullness, after the five long thimbles of red me the nurse took,
murmuring what a good vein,

I was back home guzzling, shouting, reversing
all the wide and soft surges towards the blue,
thrust back into rusty, granular personhood.

Channel

When they speak of the transmitters,
all that specialized nectar in our skull,
our forest of brain, all those upward-longing spires
and spirals of nourishment, among bent necks of decay,
they miss how that is all You, gilding, guiding,
never shameful or toying, Mother, always
an artist, persistent in Her love, maker of our brain. 

The woman who used to channel a great Tibetan master now plunges into the slowest days of her existence. On the screen, explaining to us that he can’t arrive today, she is gaunt. The infusions, she says, are helping. To keep housing his voice, her nervous system needs repair. Or what she thought was once trustworthy, clarity from the stupor of space, has turned on her.

But to accept You,
to let You decide

what I might say in that moment with a confused friend,
or to whisper Your wideness just sitting in hours of traffic

after the man who was once a child closed down the bridge,
threatening since dawn to clear himself in the water—

seeing each face behind
each wheel as Your child—

there is no breakdown when the tunnel expands.