Tryst

For when we are Jacob

Photo by Ruben Mishchuk on Unsplash

A short post this time, friends, for those moments we’re honest enough with ourselves to admit to wrestling with the angel: the times we step outside ourselves enough to see the angry sweat beading on our foreheads as we pin him, pin him, pin him again only to have him slip sideways from our grip.

Reflecting on R. S. Thomas’ “Amen,” (“And God said: How do you know? / And I went out into the fields / At morning and it was true.”), Carys Walsh submits that faithful acceptance is “a radical surrender of any attempt to ‘domesticate’ God…and of our own carefully constructed persona.” In a bit of an ironic turn, I wonder if subjecting oneself to the wrestling is its own kind of acceptance—a path into itself.

The sun rose above him when he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip.

— Genesis 32:31

…Under the song

Of the larks, I heard the wheels turn
Rustily. But the scene held;
The cold landscape returned my stare;

There was no answer. Accept; accept.
And under the green capitals,
The molecules and the blood’s virus.

— Thomas, “Amen”

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Tryst

Originally published in Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal vol 18, 2024.

I am always close, never more
than a midnight walk from the heel-
spun halo where he and I met
and meet, locked again
on river’s edge—will
against will, wave upon wave
upon wave.

In humble trist
the grass blades bend familiar bows—
         plowshares 
churning soil in small spaces,
charming life from dust again.

Again. 

It may be I’ll take him 
by surprise beneath a dark moon
or wrapped against winter’s chill. Until then, I re-
turn, twist, grasp a heel
of bread from the loaf-ward
         and beg
not a wound—that was never it—
but for the healing hand to touch me: 
show me where the pain comes from.

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Postscript

• tryst: an appointment to meet at a certain place and time.

• trist: sorrow; sadness.

• loaf-ward: Old English hlaf-weard → Middle English hlaverd → Modern English lord

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