Four Sonnets To The Holy Ghost

1.
Some say they’ve seen you, seen a maybe ghost,
a shred of stranded autumn fog at dusk
among autistic trees, inert, at most
so mildly touching, and never being touched.
Some say they’re heard you, say you hum and brood
like pigeons wait out rains beneath the eaves
rehearsing unimportant coos, till shooed
by bb guns or brooms or squads of blowing leaves.
So sad that you are sought among the runes,
the humours, intuitions, moods, and maybes.
Yes, you are still — like rapt Cistercian tunes
and yes, you are small — like Boticelli’s babies.
Not nudges at night, nor questions in the brain
like tremors in the bed from a distant train.

2.
Dear mother and doting bee, from clover to clover
now hover, now settle, now check and dab and spoon
and check and spoon again, feed over and over
blossoms deep as throats and wide as noon.
Apothecary bee, replete with potions,
sort, apportion, calculate the yield,
assign to each their term within equations
calibrating beauties of each field.
But how each grateful flower brings to ground
your math. We worship thee, we trust and cling
(how heavy is a life?) , we soon impound,
enshrine, and clamber on your tender wing.
Your concrete love is your honeybee plight:
your now more full, more impossible flight.

3.
The Baptist sees you wing from past the sun,
from off the waters where the world had been
but now where worlds lie drowned, where none
but floating dead are all you’ve seen of men
while searching for a solid dock for God –
but now, regale the Father’s ark with news!
Like daring buds on Aaron’s dying rod,
a flash of green in brown and boring views
of sea, a living knoll where you can rest
with trees whose twigs bow up to greet your kiss
then twine to form a voluntary nest:
it’s Jesus, dry oasis in this wet abyss!
So stop, and sip the dew, and nibble dates,
then fly a newborn sprig to Him Who Waits.

4.
Apostles heard you rumble like the gospel caged:
a thrum like fourfold beasts in martial ranks
or Jordan bound a mile upstream, enraged,
and thrashing to and fro against her banks.
Apostles felt you set their hair on fire,
flash down provincial brainstems to their lungs
then up again as sermons sweet like lyre
but urgent as a seraph scrubbing tongues.