Four Poems About Knowing And Not knowing by kate Young Wilder

In each of these poems, I am addressing--wrestling even--with what we can know and what we cannot know. The theme, "explanation," interests me tremendously. We look, all our lives, for answers, don’t we? My goodness, we long so deeply for them. My best conversations move around and through and inside those longings. 

The Curious Task of the Living

A thin skim of early ice

reflects pink, orange, purple, from sky to pond—

and pond to sky—speaking to us, it seems,

while we wait and watch for birth

even as our oldest is fading before our sorrowed eyes.

This world of God’s uses language

we cannot seem to voice ourselves;

though we almost recognize certain words—

and see them declared—

these shortening days of December.

There is so much we cannot know.

Though we want to.

Still—if we watch, slowly, and wait,

from fading to dim to dark,

and oh, illumined once more—

we will find hope.

That other birth and death,

told long ago,

is still the best we have.

Bethlehem or New England—

it’s all the same:

the curious task of the living is to wait.

And try to comprehend.

There is no hurrying it up. No quick solution

to the problem of longing

for what we cannot know;

for what…listen to me, please…

we will know—amazed—

when finally, one day, we see.

+++

Pastor Bob Knocks at the Door

“Ask, and it will be given you;

Knock, and the door will be opened for you.”

                                                                                                —Matthew 7:7

When I heard the knock

I set down the book I reading to my grandson,

and went to the door. “John,” I called to my husband.

“It’s Pastor Bob.”

We had only been back in town a few days

and church was cancelled on account of snow.

We missed our friend.

Before there were even words,

something in his eyes—some agitation—

confirmed what we had heard:

the doctors said there was nothing left to do for her.

“I wanted to give you this book,” he said,

passing me ‘The Tao of Inner Peace.’

“We’ll be starting it on Tuesday morning.”

He answered our questions:

she is home; the ultrasound

showed blockage;

no, he didn’t want to take home

some turkey soup I just made.

Then he looks—all at once —like he wants

us hug him and bring him in,

and like he wants us to please, leave him alone.

If only there was something

to do with his hands,

now that he wasn’t holding

a book, he might survive

this moment when he brought us something—

but when he also

maybe needed something.

What might we have given him?

I did say, “Peace…peace,” slowly, emphatically,

as he stepped back to the snowy dooryard.

“Yes,” he replied quietly

as if something deep in me

had greeted something deep in him.

Then he went to his truck.

I wonder though:

what did he see as my husband and I stood at the door?

Did he see us as a couple

taking for absolute

granted

all this health? All this extra time?

Or did he see this other man who survived

his first wife’s cancer: her diagnosis, illness,

five years of treatments, and those last two weeks

(that always bring tears when he speaks to me of them)?

Does our friend need to see a husband who knows what he knows?

Was there a question hanging in the cold air between them?

Was there an answer?

+++

The Second Coming

As a girl, I worried

that any minute it could happen.

That’s what all the Baptist songs said:

Morning or noon or night.

Coming again. Coming again.

Sunday after Sunday we sang it.

But what if it happened while I was at school?

Would I have time to get from my desk in Miss Leavitt’s class

all the way up to my older brother on the third floor?

And what about our family?

My father, so often in the hospital,

and our baby brother, always sleeping:

How would they know what to do?

I imagined the crowds ascending to heaven—

I had seen the lovely renditions of how it will be:

Watery colors of heavenly skies

with golden beams of sunlight reaching for me.

I had always imagined the beams

a kind of holy escalator—

and escalators scare me.

There would be so many of us—

and I know what a crowd can do:

a six-year-old girl could be swallowed up, like that!

And what good are streets paved in gold

if you don’t have your mother?

Please, God, I used to pray,

don’t let it happen. It’s good here:

The smell of my dad’s worn shirt,

my mother’s voice harmonizing country songs

with him after supper.

We are moving soon to an old farm they just bought

and there is this barn and a cold brook and a warm pond.

My father says he’s going to fill that barn with animals.

And my mother says we can swim in the pond

if we don’t mind the muck.

We don’t mind at all.  And God,

I love to swim.

+++

On Turning Sixty

One snowshoed foot.

Then the other. Snow lifts

like flour in a sifter.

I pause to slow my breath,

lean back, and think I see

a hundred birds in the tree above me.

I look more closely—

and realize—

they are not birds at all

but wintered leaves,

clinging,

twisted dry into arc of wing,

point of beak,

curve of belly.

I breath in and then out

as my imagined birds fade.

As thin legs turn back to stems.                                                              

Is what we see

all that is really there?

I plant my poles,

push off, and continue.

I drift

among knowing and not knowing.

Among leaves and birds—

what is there and what might be.