Tag: prayer

i dream of possibilities

in atmosphere

if cessation of air then
if balloon i can hold it maybe
if i can carry it over
if you catch (if you see me)
if in what happens after that i may remember (that point)
if what pierced was the inlet of air (and not skin)
if remember
if i ask you will you (try please)
if to prevent this you may (show me)
if i am breaking and fear (to remember how)
if whether an alternative (or what?) ever was
if can be helped
if this breaks everything open in the end
if asking you where does that leave me or us standing
if to this question one answer is back to the floating again
if dizzy just remembering that vertigo and
if terrified to go so far and high so fast
if needing help at altitude will there be any or only the snipers again
if alone losing air at that distance will there be others
if so and we burst at those heights will it matter
if skins gone
if breathing
if not something
if i knew i could explain at lower elevations
if i go i need to tell you i have tried before
if i go i need to tell you i am scared
if i go listen i could not speak before of this fright it had more dimensions but
if language would allow i would have shared with others i saw shaking too but
if this is time for turning to another, calling hold
if i or you should try
if what is here
if when is now
if_____then, how?
if i am running out of pen

Echo

In an aftermath

Maybe what lasts after endings is this
wind as song stripped of technique
bells as sound of fallen leaves, light
a riot of color, firing life–––––––
and stars as receivers who curve
long necks of shine to hear each
prayer in context at a distance
to reveal how this planet for now
at any given moment still pulses
with these voices of us reminding
us please–– and dear–– and help––
beyond the beyonds of this all.

Still Waters

With cat.

In the early morning, an hour for the dust, your altar, your black eye, long since healed, the ridge of the once-purpled nose still visible in certain lights. That weather is over now, moved elsewhere, but still you come to sit with it.

This morning’s sounds are birds and the laundry room just outside the door, and dogs after a passing truck. The phone rings at an odd hour and familiar panic crashes like a wave. But it is nothing, a pocket dial.

And yet, it means something to gather these nothings to the chest and hold. Either because unless I still do this, I am nothing––or because I am essentially nothing, and it is good to be among my kind. Probably both are true, but I don’t get to know.

So, I sit here with these nothings and now here the solid weight of this cat pouring herself into my lap, to hold and be held. She is someone, this cat. She won’t do this with anyone else. I think she likes that I am good at disappearing, too––into the bed, the chair, the book, the music, birdsong.  And, when interrupted––gone.

She is a great teacher the art of emptying the form, so that the liquid of something else may come in. I have spent enough time with the form itself, testing its limits to see what it will take. A lot, it turns out, but for what? When those limits finally cracked, I felt something else move in. It will not be named so it is nothing, and here we are now, these insubstantial breaths our sum, and the sum of us nothing, too.

Wayward One

Willing to approach

Even this pot-bellied prayer, who staggers to the altar half-drunk with delusion, and the other half hungover with optimistic excess, leaning now into despair, even in blindness, in these neglected robes, stinking and torn in all the wrong places, with potatoes growing where hearing might breathe, who can’t carry a tune to save a life, who can’t even start by saving the one they have, who will forget this morning’s penitence at the next chance to scheme some way ahead––even this one here is greeted with the warmth of a loving parent just now seeing a beloved child for the first time after so long away that anyone with any sense would have declared them lost, a hopeless case, too far gone.

Note

At a cliff.

Say it’s a last day. Say the seagull knows. Say this is the explanation for that seeming pointed look where it stops just now on this eye-level post. There are these urgent clouds at the horizon, the edge of a tongue frayed toward song. Bodies inflected against the tide. To be washed, a quiet instrument waiting. If our dead watch, let someone play me now. That I may praise it, too.

Potentials

In the pregnant pause.

If the edge
if the fall
if the downpour
or a sudden neglect
of the next breath
if in the heat to the land
of no light the blind prophet
will not come, if the wailing
starts again, if the Edens are
forever gone and the third day
brings no relief and the next call
no answer if the cold brings the
ships again––or won’t, please do
not lay this down while you are
here. Please, stay
for the carrying
until there is
none.

Complaint from the Ground

Regarding the ongoing restoration project.

And I watched another raging hero with the priest, disputing the last claim to spoils of war––at the end of another bloody year, another daughter’s ransom, and the muzzled prophet muted, and I know you sent your heralds, but their words were weak against the noise. You said I had to learn to let things be as they are, but who was I to untie myself of every assumption inherited at altitude? Even the clouds are flying now from the weight of this constellation of atoms, held fast while the widening day goes on, denying all assurances that tomorrow or tomorrow or tomorrow will return from the place where it flew off right now, to somewhere past the sight lines, out of reach.

Between Places

Beneath signs.

City of the sun, salve my sins and give me second skins in half-off drive-thru plastic packets with a color for every fluorescent mood, forget the shadow. Food’s first rush shakes the rattle, hard- fisted billboards of it banging now, now, now at the table. One day I’d like to meet someone––city, are you listening your eyes in every limb the undulating spread of you––someone across the table draped in shade, can you imagine in the radiant quiet of those hands, another pulse?

Exit mobile version
%%footer%%