glossolalia — Chris Wheeler
“I come away bleeding from these wild places”
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Chris Wheeler is a writer and poet rooted in Middlebury, IN. His work has been published in Barren, Fathom, Kingdoms in the Wild, and The Rabbit Room, among others. He has published two collections of poetry: Solace: Poems for the Broken Season (2020), and Masks & Mirrors (2023). He writes regular long-form work and poetry at Tethered Letters. He lives with his wife and five children in his childhood home, where he recently harvested his first flush of mushrooms.
glossolalia
(after Olav Hauge)
Wide bands of mist roaming
the contours of the land insist
upon caution. Walk slowly, then.
The back of the beast expands
like a sigh, contracts like a womb.
All is silence, transition, just the facts.
Then, foaming up out of the thicket,
the flurry of birds. If I come now
to the edge of decision, please:
don't give me the whole truth.
We have walked miles along this shore.
Drawn taut along the pasture line,
funnel-webbed and shining like
the things you cannot teach us,
it rises up, a city from deep water,
as if the old legend was only the first
of many stories to be told. The dawn
is atlantic, the horizon convalescent
on the twisting ledge of the land, crying:
don't give me the sea for my thirst.
In answer, a whisper and a spark,
a vision of arks and altars heaven-lit.
My head bends like a shadebound aster,
inclining to yours, light-chasing. In the hollow
a grapevine scrapes the ground. In the thicket
rasping voices coil into thrice-bound chords.
My memories of this place are long
as shadows in the golden hour, sweet
as meetings under fire, and still I beg you,
don't give me the sky when I ask for light.
You have always drawn me ever-home
along deer trails and bruised bluestems,
mysteries of absence played out below
creaking hickories leaking hull-clad histories.
I come away bleeding from these wild places
without answers, only rites of passage
enacted shoeless, only the blessing
of hunger and thirst. The fire, the mist,
the boat: I cannot bear to see your face,
but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote.Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash
Beautiful descriptive imagery!
My interpretation is that the writer is seeking a manifestation of God’s presence or guidance (hinted at in “a vision of arks”, perhaps the Ark of the Covenant which represented God’s presence? Or the ark of the Flood, representing His deliverance) but at the same time acknowledging God is so beyond us that it would be like trying to drink the ocean (“don’t give me the sea for my thirst”).
I think “mysteries of absence” (line 33) is key: what is missing from our experience of all the fullness of creation? The Creator!
Although we’re incapable of seeing Him face to face (yet!), as the final 2 lines infer, we can revel in the glimpses He gives us in the small things all around us, i.e. nature.
But these are just my thoughts/attempt to crack the riddle. I may be completely barking up the wrong tree! Whatever the case, the poem succeeds in invoking a deep longing alongside a delicious satisfaction — summed up in the phrase “I come away…without answers…only the blessing of hunger and thirst”.
And I think that’s so much the nature of faith: the constant tension of longing & fulfilment.
There's something achingly familiar and yet wildly strange about this, and it's beautiful. <3