Prayer for Stability

on St. Benedict's Day

“All human evil comes from this,
man’s inability to sit still in a room.”
—Pascal

The house, the chestnut trees, the sometimes unkempt lawn,
the sagging wall of stone behind, the well-trimmed hedge before,
with waving neighbors, unknown pilgrim profiles passing by;
they park before our house and head on to the beach,
where I walk too, then past the sea and to the trees beyond
then circling back around the graves that form the heart
of this our seaside city, turning home,
I come again to this our place on holy ground.

For nearly fifty years I’ve sunk my roots here by my wife,
with restless feet and uncalm heart yet ever here,
and will stay here and, God will, will be borne from here.
As we, when buying this old house, called it the Morgan place
while knowing only that some long-gone Morgans sailed their ships
moored at the base of Fish Flake Hill beneath our lee,
so too, some future passersby, though knowing nothing more,
will say, But that’s the old Bull place, you know.
They won’t know, but will say it anyhow.
It’s what is said, you know, of unknown dead.

Like my friend C. G., now gone, I could have made a monk;
I think I might have lived companionably
with all the standard vows: obedient, poor, and chaste—
if only I’d no flair, no urge for women, sure.
But then there is that Benedictine specialty,
a fourth vow which the Rule asserts: stability.
A hard test this, and yet somehow the vow that I love best.

It flies at everything this screen between us screams at me
about the best, the latest, untried, mostly untruest;
it leans into the wind that alcoholics call
a geographic cure, the certainty that happiness
lies anywhere but here, the thought that movement
gives sobriety and newness all we’ll never find at home.
I’ve often roamed, by day and week and even month:
Camino pilgrim, snowbird, migrant west to east. Born within sight
of Golden Gate, I’ll die within a whiff of lobster meat
that crawls from traps to trucks below our hill and thence
to boiling ends. I hope to skirt their stirring fate.

I’m well here now, an old man rooted down,
loved tenderly by wife and caring Lord.
A score of years from now, or overnight, who knows,
this foursquare house will be my final stable home, God will,
where our last breaths are drawn and murmured our amens.