A sphere is confounded by two paths,
and the direction of each is a final way.
In one path there is faith and in the other there is love,
as if everything that exists between
is a mode of art which it forever strove to know.
It will spend the best years of its life
moving across an empty plane,
knowing well the method and the consequence of its strife,
but electing motion to rediscover that path which God does not touch.
The sphere is held in the crease
of no palm, because it retains a will such
that it will freely fade from faith, and return, and will not cease
if the forces of its movement continue to help
its form if it begins to ease.
God must desire its return
in order to claim it, for the sphere burns,
burns like the shadow that it emanates when it is eclipsed
by God’s light if it cannot create. It will turn
into some great and forgotten ellipsis,
a beautiful, motionless artistic tragedy.
And yet, if it were to remain in the air above
the world absent of holy light,
in a hemisphere which has no churches
and is dependent on human love
to preserve its unageing immensity,
the sphere would be content, alive
in an eternally bent world. It
would be the heavy snow settled on the bark
of a thousand aged birches, if only to be able to write
a poem on what it means to see trees in the dark.
There is a fixed point above both worlds,
and the sphere is a victim of an unending waver,
and while way does lead on to way,
there is an irreducible way of life that exists in
the equilibrium in the death of motion.
It exists in the hands, eyes, limbs, and heart
of the human form, the physicality that breaks apart
into particles after death, yet lingers year upon year.
It exists in the artistry and the ambiguity between faith and love,
which captures the motion of any given sphere.
Equilibrium is the state which is touched by
both divinity and art. And I,
being the victim of the Pendulum’s function
am a paltry object which will traverse
the planes in a controlled motion. I am tethered and imbued
with the love of both Agape and verse. It is true
that I am held in the crease
of no palm. But I, from point to point, will fade through
my rest by the edgings of a thread, and will never cease.