The Lord's Prayer

You can't fake it. You know when I fail to achieve the expected: palm the becoming- comatose bullfrog, legs collapsing as they may, and chuck it (we used to say) high as you can. Let it fly stone-like to the skylight in the low dome of fog—another requirement of the game: a foggy day and a bullfrog and you, Vincent. The old code goes back and forth between us as we take our turns, childhood pals, engaged by the game we once called Kamikaze—now, a nameless ceremony. Nameless not because a boy's play calcifies in a man's conviction; not because, despite our promise, you've become a mid-rank fighter pilot, and I a minor poet; and not because it's too unpleasant to name what brings to hand that astonished muscle only to leave it, later, sprawled on the current. The perfect toss sends the critter shattering for an instant, beyond fog, into the invisible. Disappearance is success. Once you said, "My insides tickle whenever it happens," and so I know you've been tickled five times, and I three. That's the score; the score matters little. The name is gone because we're from here, and, being native, cannot visit how it is that an urge to which we tend tends to us— how we are cruel, inscrutable, indefensible, yet holy. How we send up bodies of praise from our right hand, only to gather eventual elegies— flesh stunned still as words—in our left. Once again the center of the heavens is earth. We've thrown as high as we can for as long as we can remember, only to await some return: a revelation, plummet, explosive splash. So it is that two grown men may stand again in stillness, awaiting word, friends who glimpse for seconds at a time earth as it is in heaven, ankle-deep in Rowan Creek with eyes uplifted, reflecting the fog to the fog itself.