The Tabernacle

Hope fills me this morning as I fashion letters

into a tree that sighs, that stays put yet moves,

reaching to its limits, swaying and settling,

a compass pointing to its place on earth

where every morning it blocks the sun

for me, at work in my studio,

where I scratch and scrawl and loop

letters into shapes so I can enter the Tabernacle

of their bodies and hear each foot, each syllable

sending its roots to a depth as great as that tree’s,

which has been standing and rooting and swaying

long before I came to memorize its plain mystery,

its wide-bodied hull open to stars at night,

each a point that I lengthen into a letter

and each letter into a word, and with the words

build a Tabernacle for the ten most broken

and the ten most resonant words. I will place them

in an inner sanctum enclosed by hanging carpets,

and outside it, another space enclosed by carpets,

and outside it, another, so that those who wish

to read the words, to say them out loud,

must first pull one curtain back and step inside,

and then another, and another until they arrive

in a hushed space, a soundproofed, heavy quiet

where they come to know that which makes all things

day after day,

and out of which the earth was made.

Stepping behind each curtain they learn

that the mystery of making is not a secret hidden within

but a series of moves, a sequence of steps,

outlined on a blueprint with notes and call-outs,

white on black, constellations in the night sky,

the primordial living Torah, circulating in the letters

as trees circulate light, capturing it with their leaves,

caching it within the soil, then drawing it back up,

watering the tallest branches with the radiant dark.

Source: The Shadow Architect (Copper Canyon Press, 2008)