Many Waters

In my new book, Voiceless Choirs: Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs, I mention that the original title was Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs. My friend and fellow writer, Matt Randles, suggested making that the subtitle and drawing a title from a line in one of the poems. I decided to take Matt’s suggestion and began reading through the poems for a line that could work as a title.

At length, I settled on Voiceless Choirs, a line from “Many Waters.” This poem attempts to imagine the unimaginable: God as He is in Himself, outside of creation or time. If imagining this is difficult, putting it into words is even more challenging since our vocabulary has no reference points outside this creation. Imagery is the closest we can get to talking about God apart from the world as we know it.

“Many Waters” is an older poem and was included in my first book of poetry, The Wind and the Shadows. Whether or not I succeeded in my goal, I’m not sure. But I still like the result and feel it works as a poem.

Many Waters

Many waters, without beginning or end.  
Without surface. It was only depth. It was 
only inside, not outside.  It was not form, 
only flow.  And it danced without feet, 
an irradiating urge, worshiping ecstatically in 
the silent music of self-knowledge. It was 
alone.  But it was not alone.  There was 
itself and Itself and ITSELF, flaring out 
from centers into peripherals that were 
centers flaring out. It was alone.  Like the 
beginning and the end shut into a single book, a single 
word that neither ends nor 
begins but is an absolute whole: a story 
told.  And this story was noun, and noun was 
all it was.  And this story was verb, and 
verb was all it was.  So with verb and noun 
it wrote the stars and the planets and the 
interstellar dust and the rings of Saturn 
and the orbit of the moon and the atmosphere 
of the earth and the sun beating down on a 
lake in June.  And it wrote a man and a 
woman and a love and a race that withered 
before it bloomed.  But that was when, and 
it wasn’t the beginning, because there was 
no beginning: it was all in the book and the 
book was shut and the book was whole.  It 
was only noun.  It was not verb.  It was 
only verb.  It was not noun.  And it burned 
with a tender violence and danced without 
feet in itself, a radiating adoration 
reaching and leaping; flaming out, flaming out, flaming 
out: wild & beautiful, sweet & 
docile; the song of songs coursing and 
pounding through pure, veinless desire: 
pulsing, urging, worshiping, being.  Alone 
and ALIVE. There was no time.  There was 
only   itself—voiceless choirs
kaleidoscopically weaving Joy and the most 
exquisite mystery: a secret shared between 
knowing smiles.