Certainty [Edward Taylor . . . ]

Edward Taylor was a frontier minister who wrote a prolific

amount of devotional poetry. The poems are full of deep piety,

learned and quiet, but sometimes an errant wildness runs under

the seams of his words.

It’s said that he wrote poetic meditations to put himself in the

correct spiritual state for his communion with Christ.

I imagine the task swallowing him each time, moving its own

patient way like snowmelt. A poem may hold the unwieldy pieces

of the earth together with a whole heart; a poem may cut that

heart to lace.

His first wife, Elizabeth Fitch, bore eight children; five died in

infancy. Taylor wrote more and more sermons and poems.

Sometimes a conceit makes itself necessary in the safety of the

impasse between word and world. And make my Soule thy holy

Spoole to bee, writes Taylor.

His parishioners were called to worship in the wilderness

with a beat of a drum, amid cold plants, the night coming on,

undelivered ashes of stars.

Flocks take to the sky at dusk. I have wondered if the parishioners

counted the days.

As in: Did they ever travel past the corrective of the afterworld to

stand in the strong spine of rivers? According to Taylor: In Heaven

soaring up, I dropt an Eare On Earth: and oh! sweet Melody!

—(Or weren’t there deranged cries in the wilderness, too?)

Taylor’s trust appears both adamantine and vulnerable, like the

slow plan of the flowering grass or torn, stilled clouds.

Alone in his study, he writes down some dimensions—

I’m but a Flesh and Blood bag, Oh!

Consider the strange and riotous interior, through which so many

nameless things fly.

As weeds continue to idle their tails, leaves molder right on time.

In the rafters of the sky, a pristine star shines with unassailability.

It can’t be taught a thing.