A friend recently sent me some poems written by a Jesuit priest, Ed Ingebretsen, who is living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina while finishing a doctorate in American literature at Duke University in Durham. I was moved by their clarity and honesty and sent away for Father Ingebretsen’s two volumes of poetry, To Keep from Singing and Psalms of the Still Country (both published by Resource Publications, 160 East Virginia Street #290, San Jose, California 95112). We’re thankful to Resource Publications for permission to reprint these poems.

— Ed.

Vows
Sometimes it seems
our lives are marked not so much
by the vows we live
as by the way we desire to live them.

we would be poor
we would be chaste
we would be obedient.
We have promised these.

But first we will be human
and experience the terror
of our own greed: we will experience
how all the things we want
pull us apart.

We are human, born cracked
like clay pots
to live broken, balancing
the breadth of our vision against
the painful shallowness of our reach.

We promise what we must:
yet we will live among the promises
as Moses among the shattered tablets
and in the breaking
cracking
not reaching
we will know our humanness —
the most total promise we can ever make.

We promise to be human
in need of God, always in search
of our salvation.

We can only promise to keep seeking
the divine; but God alone
can save our vows
from the strength of our weakness.
Unfinished
Living in an unfinished room —
myself a piece of furniture
sharing the one threadless rug
with a decade of populations.
I am surrounded by tag-ends
of memory, the scraps and leavings
of people, smiles and moments —
the coats and hats of love
of those gone on to live elsewhere,
there to die in private peace.

I’m tired of the bare floor —
tired that the windows were
not taped, but painted anyway,
and are streaked as much
by failed efforts
as by the positive scars
of heat and storm.
This is the kind of air
that makes for rust —
this the kind of place
one hesitates to furnish
for fear it might last.

My heart spits at me like a cat.
The air pits me
like sand blowing at the beach,
picking at my resolve
like nervous fingers.
It’s January in North Carolina —
it always rains.
However named Gentle
However named Gentle,
your violence Lord
opens more worlds than closes:

       We are clay and undefined:
circle, round, mold,
       give us lines.

       We are stones, children of black rock:
crush the veins, grind,
       hew, hone.
Free the waiting diamond.

       We are surf, urgent, denied,
restless in tongue of moon:
       dredge us deeply, stir,
       settle us like sand.

       We are steel;
straighten, stretch, fire;
       melt us, shape, thin us
       like strong wires.

       We are seed, dry, desiccated:
rain us, green us as once we were,
       shell us.
       The harvest remembers not
       the cut.
Year’s End
In late December one wishes to know
where all the months went, and why so ill spent,
as we recall old hopes of years ago.
Watching a squirrel cling to a branch, intent
on thieving an oak of its last dried leaves
I thought how much alike we are, in this.

For both it’s a time to pause, and to rest — less
secure with what we have, with what we’ve saved
or attained — a time instead to witness
to how short our reach has fallen. We braved
with love the seasons’ gifts; but, for all that
we have taken and all yet to be sought,
it is Christ’s own achieving that winter
declares:
               Be barren as the trees, my months,
that I may cling solely to this: Christ here,
my hard-fought harvest, my hunger’s one strength.
A hard grace
& I remain alone
hungry as a fire,
thirsting for all the shapes
and mountains
I’ve come to know as you.

& I remain
alone, holding
as the day dies,
like the wind from the shore,
a fall of rain, brief
as a sparrow’s whistle
in the slight air of dusk.

As if a universe opened
between my tight fingers, and you
passed through like a comet,
like rain, like wind crackling with dust.

I could not hold you;
could not say stay, could not
make you fall,
spend yourself on me
like some storm.

I could not hold you
and now the sun slips delicately
between the rain, as you,
through my fingers
to find and scatter, a hard grace
on the earth below.