Dew and ink

(with gratitude for Madeleine L’Engle)

A tow-headed middle-grader, I sat
slack-jawed in a musty, crescent-
shaped reading chair
in Holy Cross Lutheran’s library.

My head bowed
over yellowed, dog-eared
pages,
my mind (as if chanting)
before it knew to chant:

Homage to that One,
the Blessed One,
the Worthy One,
braider of astrophysics,
calculus, and violin.

Freewheeling polymath,
spiritual savant,
I honor you.

I bowed over her book,
lips mouthing her thoughts
in some apeish
impression of prayer.

But there in that school library,
ensconced between
big, blocky computers
running Windows 98,
between the covers
of her books, my mind
simmered, simmered, simmered.

Vivaldi, the music of the spheres,
the ecstatic vision of St. John,
it began to coalesce
into kaleidoscopic panoply.

The Divine Spark surged
through synapses:
prodromal and insistent,
utterly neurological,

equal parts
biotic
        and energetic,
electric and spiritual.

I drowned in the spray of phenomena.

But behold! a woman
who rent the veil altogether,
and Christ, no longer cloistered,
escaped that intellectual holy of holies:
religion.

He bounded,
     out of the temple,
            off the page,
given free domain
over His creation.

Madeleine, you brought me to the Dance.
And in the decades since,
the world has not gone still.