In the prayer room there is only
the faint ticking of the heater
cooling, the salt lamp’s gentle
glow reflected on the glass-topped
table, shells resting in a quiet bowl
while out the window trees stand
hushed. Nothing moves. The ticking
stops. The silence deepens, flows,
embraces all but whispered pen on
paper longing to capture what can’t
be caught.
If all that rises praises you, my Lord,
then bodies sprung from pews can picture forth
saints springing up in bloom from stony earth.
The hands that higher rise and halo toward
the pendant lights catch a gleam and clap
as if a choir of holy beings praises,
descending but to bring us up, and raises
us all until the binding cords go snap.
But you, that love me, tell me to go back?
To grasp the cord and haul myself toward ground,
down, to the home that everywhere I lack.
So, tell me now, how can a way be found
for danté
and virgil whence
they trespassed so
in the Inferno
’twas that was as
it was
for My Son, too
in his harrowing
of it . . .
on that Holy Saturday
when at
mid-tierce,
about 7:30
in the mourning,
mine, I
pondered, too
why, oh why
My God
hast thou forsaken
me, too?
but in no time I
would know not
to be
miss-taken,
for My Son
had only
descended therein
long enough
“I hate to say most of these prayers written by saints-in-an-emotional-state.
You feel you are wearing someone else’s finery and I can never describe my heart
as ‘burning’ to the Lord (who knows better) without snickering.”
—Flannery O’Connor
A boy rides in circles on his trike
inside the yellow light of an open garage.
Driving home after dark, I see him there,
a little spinning world, all self-contained.
I know the family, know his mother must,
though unseen, be somewhere nearby watching,
but in that skinny light he seems so all
alone. Childhood is very lonely, I think
and look into the rearview mirror, where
the oldest of my three kids sits in back
and reads by flashlight while I drive her home.
Each time she turns the page, a shadow moves
Hanging behind the cellar stairs: finally,
he rested. But on the eighth day, God thought better of it
and made possible the tenderest of thefts:
that of milk-white bones plumbed by the heavens
and dug up for the grief-stricken to see.
For all, God said: Let there be light
where there is dark.
Let there be truth in an empty sea—but once,
answers in their absence.
And so the angels were given the most vigilant of tasks
to part, on only a moonless night, the grass-covered
Around the table, we drink coffee
in small cups, peel oranges
with little knives. Crumbs of cake
dot the blue cotton tablecloth
like chunks of houses all over Umbria
felled in the streets.
Just when the pieces of our lives
fall into place, another tremolo
sets us afire, breaks us into pieces
where our fears multiply.
The lights flicker. Television falters.
I look up at the wooden beams,
imagine them crushing us,
leaving the house roofless
where concrete used to be.