Some more Christian Wiman, from Every Riven Thing, for your Friday reading.

One time

I. Canyon de Chelly, Arizona

Then I looked down into the lovely cut

of a missing river, something under

dusk’s upflooding shadows

claiming for itself a clarity

of which my eyes were not yet capable:

fissures could be footpaths, ancient homes

random erosions; pictographs depicting fealties

of who knows what hearts, to who knows what gods

To believe is to believe you have been torn

from the abyss, yet stand waveringly on its rim.

I come back to the world. I come back

to the world and would speak of it plainly,

with only so much artifice as words

themselves require, only so much distance

as my own eyes impose

on the slickrock whorls of the real

canyon, the yucca’s stricken

clench, and, on the other side,

the dozen buzzards swirled and buoyed

above some terrible intangible fire

that must scald the very heart

of matter to cast up such avid ash.

2. 2047 Grace Street

But this world is more often refuge

than evidence, comfort and covert

for the flinching will, rather than the sharp

particulate instants through which God’s being burns

into ours. I say God and mean more

than the bright abyss that opens in that word.

I say world and mean less

than the abstract oblivion of atoms

out of which every intact thing emerges,

into which every intact thing finally goes.

I do not know how to come closer to God

except by standing where a world is ending

for one man. It is still dark,

and for an hour I have listened

to the breathing of the woman I love beyond

my ability to love. Praise to the pain

scalding us toward each other, the grief

beyond which, please God, she will live

and thrive. And praise to the light that is not

yet, the dawn in which one bird believes,

crying not as if there had been no night

but as if there were no night in which it had not been.