Wisdom
For the young man who would have
myrrh from a woman,
and cinnamon and aloes,
smoother than oil is her mouth. She flatters him with it.
Between her lips lies death.
The young man learns that as his bride he should instead have taken
Wisdom to him.
Wisdom is the words that figure her as
fear of the Lord.
She has seen Israel choose the ways of the oppressor.
The young men
Strangeness would claim
She instructs.
Wisdom pleads with them at the city gates that when
pride comes,
then comes shame.
Let a man meet rather
with a bear and her whelps
than with folly.
Withhold not
good from those to whom it is due.
The Lord’s eyes are on
every place,
as on
Hell and destruction. Whose
order was it
that made the ends of the earth?
Who put clothes on the deep?
What is his name, and what is his
son’s name,
if you can tell?
Wisdom can. Still a child,
she attended God when God had not yet
divided the waters.
It was no one but
God’s to do
to divide what
isn’t said
from what is.
If God was
male already,
Wisdom was not male.
(It may have been Wisdom’s
difference from God that let God speak
good into being.)
Wisdom
was God’s delight.
She was with him over the waters.
The still unformed
deep would have lasted
had God not given it form.
It made God tremble that His call for it to be
light there
would not let
night touch day. (There had to be room
between them
or they couldn’t be what
God said they were.)
God and
Wisdom were two.
Day and night were two also.
Day gave it to be seen at once that
down was
and
up.
The deep had a face.
God’s breath
hovered over it until there was
wind there instead.
The wind is in force in
many places over the earth’s dry land.
Its going
on like that
is so it too can have extension
and still not be seen.
A door woke me.
It was having to
open and then flap shut against
the stable’s north wall.
some thuds were back-to-back. After others,
there’d be
a minute or more of only the wind.
The wind had become something the trees had had between them for
days now.
They’d showed to their tops that they’d be moved
only so much.
At the same time that it was many trees,
the night wind I was hearing them in was
one. (One has to be the number
God has
against the too-many-to-count.)
If it had a back to it
in those places how far north where
right then it was quiet,
the wind’s broad front was as high as
just below God.
(That’s where God starts to be a different
nothing than wind.)
If nothing’s
around the wind to any of its sides,
Wisdom confides that
God’s around all. Inside all God holds,
Wisdom’s at the work of meaning for the faithful that there’s
good to be had,
if God’s heeded.
I wanted to be asleep so I wouldn’t go on making
God up out of the wind.
Copyright Credit: James McMichael, "Wisdom" from If You Can Tell. Copyright © 2016 by James McMichael. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. http://us.macmillian.com/fsg
Source: If You Can Tell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016)