this world's profane loveliness

This is a particularly rough week for my friend K, and she asked if she could make a request. Then she sent me this poem.

Here is a thing about graduate school: it can be miserable, and lonely, and isolating, but when you form a real and lasting friendship in the grad school trenches, it matters. It matters for its rarity, and because you've gone through a particular kind of hell together that also comes with some truly glorious high points; on the one hand, you're crying on the phone at two in the morning because you might need to quit the program, and on the other hand, the next day you spend three hours talking about John Donne. Which is all to say that this is for K, who is, along with John Donne and poems like this one, my light in the darkness of graduate school.

1.

The stars! the stars have fled the sky!—
Scratch that—the stars have skyed the flood, the sea
glimmering in pale beneath a starless black. . .

2.

No, scratch that too. I'm all exotic
metaphor, inkhorn snarls, never content
with the unelaborated thing;

always the forced apotheosis,
every least sparrow a visible sign,
strong-arming water to wine. So tenderly

I love this world's profane loveliness,
its small, scarce loveliness, like a puritan
I batter magnitude out of homespun.

3.

Faithless my zeal, for the puritan's faith
imputes us all with a roughhouse grace, most
lovely in our brokenness, bruised and bent

to glory. Scratch that—to sufficiency.
Start again: The stars are black with storms
blown shoreward; the dinoflagellates

smacked on the shoals leak light from shattered cells;
they phosphoresce the breakers in their roister.
Let me sing, then, the beauty of creatures

microscopic, who make the vastness gleam
in smithereens.

4.

                       See: starlike, after all.

—Kimberly Johnson (b. 1971), "Easter, Looking Westward." Originally published in The Journal, Ohio State University, 2006.

I heard Kimberly Johnson read some of her poetry last year, and—as I think this poem demonstrates very well—she's really extraordinary. She's also a professor of Renaissance literature, which is sort of reassuring to me personally. I think this poem is breathtaking regardless of its references, but that said, John Donne's Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward is certainly worth reading or rereading, especially today.