Uncloistered

Tomorrow I leave America.
I came home seeking retreat, renewal,
thinking I would go the Abbey at the Genesee
and find silence amongst men vowed to it.
I usually see our family home as a den or a burrow—
close and warm,
full of merry company and clamour—
more than I can bear some days.
I thought to flee it
but the land kept me.
We have a pond
ringed round with forest,
and here is holiness uncloistered—
for vespers, the wind sighing in the trees
and the drumming of woodpeckers,
the water disturbed, time and again,
by unseen frogs or angels,
where you can be baptized over and over
amongst the fishes.

Once, in the poorest province in Cambodia,
a denuded region ironically named
Long Forest, we drove through a massive
grove of bamboo on the backroads.
I was standing in the bed of the truck,
an unwomanly habit which bemused my
Khmer companions, and I threw back my
head and saw a vast vaulting arch of feathery
rustling green—heart-stoppingly lovely, a
cathedral of bamboo, and I looked down
and there was a young girl and her younger sister
walking down the road, the baby with lambent
frangipani tucked behind each of her small ears.
And I forget so much, but I promised myself
to hold them and that place, uncloistered,
in my heart forever.