The third panting stanza rises from the monstrous waves of the sea on the wings of a dove to another white vital sign of the Lord, the living sign of the Eucharist.

The f's in the opening lines sound vicious almost ferocious. The line break leaves your catching your breathe before, that is right, a chasm. Perhaps it is the chasm of th eunknown or maybe the gapping space that can open beneath your feet in a such a moment of abandonment as the speaker has just experienced. When you give your all to God, He takes it. Then there you are with nothing. The desolation that can fall on the heels of assent is often what tries to prevent us from giving our yes in the first place. The enormity of the speaker's gift crashes in on him. There is no place to hide that is not given over. The hurtle of hell opens and the speaker gasps for air in the next line, which expresses his breathelessness and his distress. (like the Gusher song, Coming Up for Air)(How little is it to ask for a place to exist?) Yet, it is indeed a great deal, since the poet is also looking for an exsistential answer, a place to fit in the universe, a One to orientate himself to, a Where for his Whatness.

His question allows him to move from the unformed chaos of ocean metaphors, to the lightness of bird images. The speaker moves on the wings of a bird, with the precise homing sense of a pigeon, the speed of an eagle from one height to another. The stanza ends solidly with a "towering" mountain image, spiritually speaking . For, now the speaker is reaping the glorious benefits of his purification with a subsequent ascent into a towering new graces, briallantly alive with a new life in God. His rush upwards is not like the laborious movments you might expect when going from the ocean to the sky, or from a state of unknowning into the clarity of love and knowledge. It doesn't seem to take any time at all. It is over in a flash. Did you catch how he moved? He fligns his heart. Doesn't it remind you of a spring fling? A fling of the heart? I may think of flinging a frisbee (and he is evoking that too) but what he wants us to remember is the love in it-- the total last gift of the heart. It is a fling of the heart to the heart of the host-- both the host of God's angels and the sacramental whiteness of the sacred Bread of God's Body.


The frown of his face
Before me, the hurtle of hell
Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?
I whirled out wings that spell
And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host.
My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell,
Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast,
To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace.