"This age of ours will one day be the distant past. And the Divine Nature can change the past. Nothing is yet in its true form." —Fox, in C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces

I'm willing to bet a good meal with some dear friends (remember what that was like?) that more than a few of us would like this age of ours to be the distant past. Mark Leidner's Returning the Sword to the Stone offers a hope-filled, how-to guide on finding true form, together. Fasten your seatbelts, however, and prepare to fall apart. The trip you're about to take features more than a few close calls, though nobody actually gets hurt along the way. No one, that is, except the person you thought you were when you started this journey.

Like the first test any driver takes, "Prism Jugglers"declares that how one sees is what one sees: 

We anointed stars the source of our laws.

Hailing from the Latin (considere, to examine the stars), Leidner is a master of consideration, aiming at the often-moving target of that which hides beneath partial truths. And like any good marksman, he shoots to win:

We hid live doves in hollowed-out Bibles.

How does anything live, unless given some space? What doesn't need some kind of emptiness, in order to actually be helpful, to be holy? He continues:

Our crowns of thorns prevented déjà vu.

Self-nailed martyrs make a dangerous crowd. And while Stone smacks of religion from the start, it's the kind that turns those You Need to Believe This-signs on their heads. A resulting "I can't believe this" emerged from my own lips while reading lines from "Volunteering":

and then a new and even more unpalatable viewpoint

cobbled itself together in the fog of my mind

as the meeting coursed on—something about

the supreme hypocrisy of taking pleasure

in resisting the enterprises of an organization

I clearly despised, yet clearly not enough

to simply leave and move on with my life

Such words could be the painfully wrought tattoos of recent days—lines that describe what is presently happening in the corporate psyche of many on earth—and the attendant I can't believe this irrupts into nothing less than the definition of wonder, a thing often eschewed by those affiliated with religion. Wonder leaves room, invites questions, makes things beautifully uncomfortable. And if a wondrous gaze is the thing, as it surely is for Leidner, he just as often turns that gaze back on himself:

Normally, I would volunteer.

It's just that right now I can't.

I have a million things to do.

He continues:

Eventually, a hand went up in the back of the room.

It was one of those people who really did

have a million things to do, volunteering.

And while the book's eponymous poem follows these lines, one feels that the real returning of the sword to the stone has much to do with that healthy stab of self-awareness, that scouring of one's own heart, one's motives.
In "Returning the Sword to the Stone," Leidner approaches the ego as piñata, taking a good whack at it with such phrases as

It's like robbing a bank with a crème brûlée torch.

or

It's like a pool where the lifeguards have rifles and they shoot
   whoever's drowning.

The candy that emerges tastes of gleeful whiplash, making you want to laugh where crying is germane:

It's like an open coffin full of complimentary muffins in the foyer
   of a funeral home.

and

It's like praying for enough suffering to obliterate the comfort
   obstructing your moral improvement, but not so much suffering
   that you lose all hope and no longer care about anything.

Trading in the currency of the knockout punch, these are lines that a roomful of people would chortle at, all the while looking around to make sure others are laughing with them. The ego needs constant reassurance, and Leidner artfully offers none of it.

"Youth is a Fugitive" teases out those things you thought you knew, toying with what you've been told to think. Leidner proposes that life's accidents make all the difference; that spinning one's wheels can result in a mess to the envy of Jackson Pollock:

Anything is possible

but everything is too expensive.

History is stranger than truth or fiction.

The eyes are teeth that see.

Grace is a diaper you never have to change.

"Having 'Having a Coke with You' with You" holds the almost-endings of a rollercoaster. But the turn's the thing, and Leidner knows his lengths. In opera, the audience breathes with the singer, literally. Great singers are great inasmuch as they have great voices, but also because they know how to breathe, and when. Leidner is a great singer, speaking from the inside edge in "Plague Blessing," a stance similar to that of a prophet, but one that knows how to comfort while proffering the comeuppance: 

Grief doesn't break your heart; it expands it. It breaks your brain;
   nature's whispered gibberish is suddenly intimate.

It's often in the whispered gibberish where poetry begins, leading to a place where the stuffs of one's life can begin to reassemble, tantamount to nothing less than hope. And while hope can sometimes feel very stupid, "The Jeansed Horse" reminds us that stupid and hope often go together. Indeed,

Knowledge lovers

hate this revelation.

If the Divine Nature can change the past, Leidner's nature, though he may balk at my saying so, is divine, inviting us to ride into a future that doesn't seem real or very possible. But we have given with our ears "the hooves of this horse/their very shoes/as the psychic lanterns/of the jeansed horse's/eyes open endlessly/on seas of sawdust darkness!" That's the magic of circus tents and spilled popcorn, of that moment when the pinball machine tilts and breaks. It's the dazzling gut-laugh of a kid knocking down a tower of blocks, or that quick rush of life and blood when one finds and makes a friend, out of the blue. Returning the Sword to the Stone feels an awful lot like all of those things, because

Every blessing is cursed

and you can't believe

how afraid you've been

your whole life that the vase would break—

Leidner helps us learn what it means to fall apart. Though instead of the vase, we're the ones that shatter:

But it's okay—

it feels awesome.

And that's a lesson, on how to return to our true form, for all of us.