saints and rain

I have returned from Oslo to Edinburgh.
I didn’t see much of Norway, but
it was as I had imagined—
a few million tall blonde people,
(some largely ignored immigrants)
flush with oil wealth in a land filled
with fjords and mountains and deep
green forests and tunnels, where the trolls
wait for the unwary traveler. A land whose
denizens consume vast lots of sour
cream and berries and sausages and waffles.

We went to a park, which is full of human
statues by Gustav Vigeland. He worked on them
for twenty years between the two world wars.
They became his life’s work, and as I gazed upon
the hundreds of human figures, some in trees,
some fighting mythical monsters, most just
living, I remember Kierkegaard, writing on
saints.

The saint, Kierkegaard wrote, wills the one thing.
The saint does not bemoan the weakness of the body,
the wickedness of the heart. The saint does not heed
a frail stomach or a fragile soul. The saint pursues the
gleaming fish of truth through the passages of her mind
and soul until she hooks it, reels it in, and guts it. The silvery
scales of captured truths lie in great mounds round her
olive-skinned feet; she wipes her blade clean upon her robe
and never chokes on the bones of her emotions.
I am no saint. I float on my back in an ocean of feeling,
my sodden robes billowing, pulled this way and that, raising
the level of the sea with my endless tears.

It was raining the second day I came to his cold people
frozen in bronze and granite
they did not heed the rain
but it dressed them anyway
in watery clothing.
The rain too, does one thing,
and does it well.

O to be rain, a saint,
to do one thing well,
to do it utterly