Even if you can’t understand the Greek or the Arabic,
it’s still good for you to be here, amid the cloud of harmonies,
swimming and bathing in the chants’ tides of tone.
From time to time, it’s good to have the meaning obscured
and to trust that the Mystery will unfold itself
despite your impatient desire for resolution with the ison’s drone.
The discord, the descant, and the dissonance of the psalms
are the hands of God driving their heels across your
burdened back of anxious knots, needing to be kneaded.
The psaltis’ glissando falls through that place between notes
and its patient pressure pushes right there — where you are
used to squirming — before finding its place in tune.
Here, where vowels become a miasma of melisma, where
melodies meander before returning to their homes of tone,
we can hear, in countless steps, our wayward wanderings sung.