Because, in its stubby brown-glass jar
or its battered, three-personed foil packet,
it gets entombed in the chaos of cartons
appearing at last, as though resurrected,
Because the lump in which it lies hidden
is formless and potent as creation’s clay,
Because I sink my hands in its history
and come up with levamen—
“solace” or “consolation,”
Because it’s consoling to smack it down—
pummel it, grinning like a Halloween demon—
and find I never defeat it,
Because its down-and-up-again persistence
is like a congregation’s kneeling and rising
(Levate, in the Latin of old rubrics),
Because, at some point in the fifty years
since I learned to file its fungal names
among the tangled roots of the Plantae,
they bloomed, those names, as a kingdom of their own,
And because this makes me smile, recalling
that leaven’s Your own little joke about the Kingdom,
Be praised, O Lord, for this bit of mystery,
which lifts, which lightens.
