Holy Places

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“The world, this palpable world, which we were wont to treat with the boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place, and we did not know it. Venite, adoremus.”
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

No Celestial room has ever compared
to the stalk of yellow bluestem held in my son’s teeth
three-quarters of a mile into a Sunday afternoon walk,
      feathered seeds dancing with every step.

Sometimes I think the worst thing we ever did
was divorce the earth from holiness—
there is no greed beyond this treading down what is free
      in our eagerness for exclusivity.

Thirty-five years since I was in my mother, always of her:
there is no parent I would rather claim than this world.
I will not number creation one, two, one, two, you are sacred, you are not.
      How could I ask for a holier blessing than this August washing

of feet by January’s melted snowstorms, come down
over forty-nine thousand feet of tumbled stone for me?
Don’t offer me my own family, forever (I have them now)
      if you cannot throw in peachy five-o’clock light.

Raise me red-tailed hawks, chanterelles, pinyon pine—I might listen.
I don’t want a world too wonderful to imagine: I want this one.
What sacraments have I passed up
      on the straight and narrow freeway to salvation?

I once asked my father-in-law the name of the delicate silver-blue plants
that mound into the Idaho distance, so lovely I ached.
Nothing but sagebrush.
                  Show me, then, the border of Eden.