Holy Living and Wholly Dying

“Yet when each of us in his own heart looks He finds the God there far unlike his Books.” – Fulke Greville

This is the favorite walk of theological students,
especially when the last leaf (tied on by expectancy)
hangs from the hollow
willow
like a trunk-label with the name MOURNFUL. And the fields are
as bare as an interior by Hammershöi, though far vaguer
through the cloudy ammonia
of anaemia.

Never will these chests be filled out by dogma,
never will these mouths unlearn their feebleness
through conned manual
or ritual.

Empty cones cover the sapless alders
with black. In black also are the students, clinging
to a church whose sustenance
is abstinence.