The Pilgrimage / Phillip Neal Tippin
Part 6
Is there something wounding and wasting
An inclusion denied while I lick the festering
With tight grip held close? Shaking, Cowering,
I plead for healing of the face’s pallor, fever, weeping
But stretch not forth the shriveled hand to the Tender of grass and flower.
Walking, rather than speak,
Let the Poet read to me.
Do we ride to write to
Tie the time to something
As to ascend and descend
a decent plot finalizing the finish first
Only to reread, retread, retrace?
Le Tour
In contrition and humility
De-age my heart by the years
It is the bidding plain
Not the ancient stand
That marks the way
Of prairie lands which
Shelter the young
Grant elders a place
Bury the same,
The gifted running still
Both wild and tame.
Delight in an alternating scene
First in thought and then poesy.
To live at limb’ed climes.
Kindly point me the way to morning
“Aye, it is just through yonder sleep.”
Part 7
I lost touch with contingency
Until the spring broke suddenly.
Rather than
Letting the old,
Hemming the new
To fit my skin
Conform, grow
To Him.
A rhyme a day’s
A step away
From fleet time’s ever sway.
Plant a garden
To discover fruit
A corded heart grant
Passage you accord
When darkness covered the screen
How close can you get
With accoutrement?
To take green umbrage
With delight and pleasure.
Part 8
The snail’s slime line
On guttered leaf, wood edge
A breath from stepfall
All the trees are off the leaves
Like theives, essentially naked
But with oil to stay the plague
And to burry their riches deep.
Palor rises when
The fight against cold
Feels lukewarm.
The man who lives by a creek
Has a wife, kids, and bridge to keep
And when the water and fish speak
They remind him of a brook washed
In the washing.
The winter light
Is trim, nimble
As fleeting.
Let me not soften the blow
Of language, seem
To compass, curtail what
Breaks upon and broke satisfies.
Too late, maybe,
But not too early.
I slept a thick sleep and dark,
Long and weighty with dreams.
So, refusing to retire their speech,
I was made to rest midst dread scenes.
Part 9
Tuesday’s toil tucked behind
The wheel’s homing turn,
Clearest mark between
The thick of things
And the thinning day.
Father,
Bring to bear the given rest
Upon tomorrow’s toil.
By Your yoke and rein take,
Plow, apply to field.
An owl broke from the cedar
As I approached the bridge
On foot. The dogs and I
Stood stalk and stared.
The hills in one’s head
Are for taking or dying upon.
The two ways:
Isolated and informed or
Coinherent and conceived.
The storm of Eve’s anguish
seething
Still wrestles on the morn.
We live in a visual word.
Part 10
Sometimes I come on quiet feet
Among the glories wrapped in sleep.
Plagued by fault in every clime.
To myself:
Slow down
To how I want
To hear it read.
Satisfied
When a man knows what he is about
And does it
And is done.
More greens
Fewer pickled things.
Down-to-earth
Like lichen lines,
The wild thyme,
And Ponderosa
Pine.
The Poet rhymes
Sickness and sin.
You grace us
With the present.
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