"Sonnet One"

With woken steps and lighted path my heart

Approaches the crowning cusp of so much sown  

When all my fears of what I cannot own

Now here decree loyalty's every part.

The most delighted avenues are those

Never looking with wary eyes to tread.

We find Him bestowing new joys unfed

And melding us in songs we can't compose.

Eyes once blind now see and blindness is sight;

The dove has descended, love weaves the flame;

Time descends, marked only by love's new name

But for now all else is encased by Light.

May lips absorb forever any tears

And feet dance His true rhythm all our years.

"Entreating the Spirit"

Oh, Greatest Love that my conscience

Most earnestly lists to entreat,

Grant me that higher unity

Of which my vain attempts

Cannot meet.

How every faculty

Will not bring its self

To your presence to greet.

So in my helpless estate

Fastbound in grace that my world

Could never compete,

Fill with Your love

My emptied being

That all I am

May be complete.

--Nathanael Fish

First published in the Asbury Review, Vol. XXV, Fall 1999

"Early New Year Parenthood"

I am sitting in Starbucks on a Sunday afternoon

because I forgot the key to my parents’ house.

The two couples in the corner play cards on a table

with a pattern no one understands the symbols thereof.

The New Year begins in the middle of the dead season.

Never could figure our that one. If the symbol is an infant,

he must be very cold and lonely.

It will be over three months before there is any warmth to comfort him.

Then, what comfort!

The snow makes a cruel blanket.

The most severe trial this babe faces comes right at the start

when the only objection that can be made is an ambiguous wail.

Well, by the time the dogwood blossom savior gets here

the New Year can only shed cold ugly tears.

No wonder there is so much color.

But there has to be some form of milk now besides the cold drifts on gutters

amidst all the dead remains and vicious beauty

that weans this child until a more solid sustenance is available.

At some point, I realize my role as this year’s parent

who stands outside the seasonal cycle

and can give a more immediate substance.

And when I feed the year it grows

and as it grows it nourishes me when I am old,

when it will sustain my feeble faith—

Until the New Year

when I become another design on the table.

--Nathanael Fish

"Mountain"

Coal black and dominating, leering

Outside my haven’s cloister window;

the luscious time-melting mounds

spread out before you are so inviting

to bliss-seeking barefoot wanderers.

When leaving monastic milieu, my heel

Will pass tawny emerald scenes

(my will the only worthy prominence),

striking harsh, jagged crags

that greet feet with untold malice.

Your knolls pseudo-sublime don’t deceive me.

I stroll and stumble anyway,

treading and struggling without pause

to know that I have seen you face,

have smacked it with my sole and moved on.

--Nathanael Fish

First published in the Asbury Review, Spring 200, Vol. XXVI

"Life on a Bridge"

Life on a bridge is a restless one;

Especially when it gets heavy traffic.

Standing in the middle, looking down

at the river with a current only slightly slowed

by unseen low-head dams,

the fallen limb floats so gracefully on its

wide aquatic path, and envy swells.

My attention snaps back to traffic

as a truck driver sets his jake brake

to grind into the random music of many motors

humming my languid mind a lullaby.

What makes it so easy for them to cross?

How are they sure which is the right lane?

I take my cramped, sweating hands

Off the rail and turn to face the traffic

with drivers continually giving me puzzled looks

to ask why I left my car in the emergency lane.

The hazard lights catch my eye

and I am entranced by their rhythm.

My phone rings that same melody

I used to enjoy but now find obnoxious.

I quickly apologize to her for running late,

and tell her traffic is heavy.

--Nathanael Fish

First published in the Asbury Review, Vol. XXVIII, Fall 2001

 "Where and When It's All Coming Into What"

The certainties of newness include finding the means to see what is new.

The conjuction of anticipation lies between your

Loosely poignant questions and my precarious inability

To disclose my inner parts. Buying just a slice of bundt cake at our first meeting

Didn't fulfill your famish.

Never met anyone like this or like this before.

Some would call this random and some would say you're not my type A fork can have its prongs bent into a spoon's gentle curve.

Yet, in a land where brazen blondes are a dime a half-dozen (effects of inflation),

a heart of virtue is worth a lifetime at the cancer bed.

Amazing the ways people learn to communicate

Without really having that much to say.

New ways to pass along without adopting fathomable empathy.

I am a veritable ocean including coral reefs, but still at low tide.

If I could only get off this lifeboat and find better nourishment than survival rations; if you could distract the tiger with the whistle,

I'll hide under the tarp and stab his gut.

Do that or tell the gorilla upstairs to stop jumping

From the window sill to the dining table.

Has my ceaseless transmigration of intuition become so transparent?

If you can see so well, become my eyes

To see through the lazy low-lying clouds of superficial consumerism.

The way we live is the way we eat

And the way I eat is the way I live.

This isn't about you and me anymore, if you couldn't tell.

 --Nathanael Fish

"Tomorrow is Always Today"

Tomorrow is always today, I said,

And today we live like yesterday.

The moments of certainties which pass

For what we call experience are the fodder

By which we call our next move the one we mean.

We only have the rest of our lives to find purpose

So we’d better get started now by whatever means.

Shake the tree and take the fruit of never second guessing

Because that seems to be the only way to really live.

The calculated existence only ends in dull equations.

Every spring it gushes forth from the heart

Has gold in the bed to be panned for investment

In today’s tomorrow full of more divining.

The logos can only take photos of the search for riches

Never capturing the motion of new adventures.

I never asked you to stay in the place of vicarious self-fulfillment;

You just seemed so willing to play the role of coaxing caprice.

Apparently, if this is not where I am supposed to be

Then something about my embodied elements

Must form a base regard for what today is.

Somewhere in the vastness of my meager actions

There is an edge growing sharper until it is ready

To cut the noose of wallowing discontent.

I must be weeping for the wrong reasons

Because my sheaves look so grotesque.

If it's all about...let me go back and figure that out.

This time the numbers aren't all in the same neat rows.

The way the rain rolls down the windshield against my wiper's response

Suggests there's something besides mocha laden insecurities and pipe tobacco broods.

--Nathanael Fish

 "Maybe Someday I Will See"

It’s an unusually cold July night in Northeast Ohio. I just turned off a depressing movie that had won enough awards that the publishers listed those on the box instead of the summary. And I don’t know why I came outside to write.

The movie seems to have a lasting reflection since it was about a bunch of loose ends that get tied up. Myself caught in a world I can’t really live in and a belief that I can’t seem to follow, the fish-shaped candle burning next to me has more loyalty in its flickering existence.

I used to mock the ones that wrote so deeply no one could understand, but suddenly it is clearer what their motivation might have been: the waterfall, the children who sing such beautiful songs but never say my name. The other me in the past that never visits, the place where prayer was valid that I forget the location of.

This seemed like a good idea to put this all down on paper but now my thoughts don’t have any more direction than this prose. I usually go for something emotionally buoyant, but right now the only way to get through is to hang onto what I have and hope some new epiphany beings me back. But how many summits of revelation have I reached only to die of exhaustion before I could enjoy the views?

 --Nathanael Fish

 Written for and read for my marriage proposal to Stacey