72 Prayer poems

Oh you saints, Let me enter your society, If only as a statistician. You’re old, Perhaps the years are Getting you down by now, Laying themselves over you In layers of color. Just let me take care Of your dirty work in All the nooks and crannies. For example I could Swallow light At the Last Supper And exhale your halos After the devotionals. From time to time, At a distance of half a wall, I could Form my hands into a horn And shout, Now for the believers, Now for the unbelievers Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re- infolding, entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by minutest fractions the water’s downdrafts and upswirls, the dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into itself (it has those layers), a real current though mostly invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing motion that forces change— this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself, also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go. I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never. It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

I want a god as my accomplice who spends nights in houses of ill repute and gets up late on Saturdays a god who whistles through the streets and trembles before the lips of his lover a god who waits in line at the entrance of movie houses and likes to drink café au lait a god who spits blood from tuberculosis and doesn’t even have enough for bus fare a god knocked unconscious by the billy club of a policeman at a demonstration a god who pisses out of fear before the flaring electrodes of torture a god who hurts to the last bone and bites the air in pain a jobless god a striking god a hungry god a fugitive god an exiled god an enraged god a god who longs from jail for a change in the order of things I want a more godlike god

For all the pain passed down the genes or latent in the very grain of being; for the lordless mornings, the smear of spirit words intuit and inter; for all the nightfall neverness inking into me even now, my prayer is that a mind blurred by anxiety or despair might find here a trace of peace.

Echo of the clocktower, footstep in the alleyway, sweep of the wind sifting the leaves. Jeweller of the spiderweb, connoisseur of autumn's opulence, blade of lightning harvesting the sky. Keeper of the small gate, choreographer of entrances and exits, midnight whisper traveling the wires. Seducer, healer, deity or thief, I will see you soon enough— in the shadow of the rainfall, in the brief violet darkening a sunset— but until then I pray watch over him as a mountain guards its covert ore and the harsh falcon its flightless young.

A network of branches crazes the sky like cracks in the glaze of a Chinese cup. Dawn, a poised dropper. History poised also. A man on the steet corner waves his sign: Germany 1934. So cold, elbows of trees creak when something flaps by— the craw craw craw— Would I be able to recognize places in Latvia by my father's absence— farmyard littered with dented milk cans, mattresses leaking straw, table set for a meal that never happened? Every morning I look out a window at a scene he wouldn't recognize, blue tide of sunrise spreading west obliterating tracks of satellites, gray tide of inlet shoring up the wrack-line. My father steps through his window. He's put on his SS uniform. He stands on a dirt road, staring toward the vanishing point where the past is rectified. The first thing I heard this morning—three harsh cries—was the black crow veering past his head.History, welcome back, it said. I watch to see what he does next. —12.8.2012

No one wants another paean to a rosy dawn, so it's good this one's bluish, baby-shade at the horizon, bleeding up into midnight like a botched dye job. And having enough of the old world—larks, crakes, nightingales, storks—this space is populated by one fly crabbing across a notebook page. He seems, like me, honey-slowed by winter's shortest days, clumsy and isolated. My love bought a black-and-white photo once, close-up of a birch trunk, fly crawling up the curled paper bark, marring the purity of the image. You don't notice the fly until you do, and then you can't stop. No one wants a fly in art, but there it is, elegantly framed. And we're over the epic, so here, first thing this morning, a pedestrian quarrel. Years ago, I flew across a mountain range in black coat and black boots to secretly meet him in the city. How many dawns did it take to arrive at this particular? At 9:30 the sky flares not like flame—a paper fan you buy in Chinatown for a dollar. A sudden breeze sways the Tibetan flags strung along the eaves. I never noticed how thin the fabric. You can see right through the printed prayers to the thermometer— five degrees—and beyond, birches leaning all to windward. Sun bleaches out the last mysterious. Now we pray to the real. —11.29.2012

for Asja In predawn dark, a rat falling from a rafter is a dollop, wind a whir, and suddenly I'm remembering my mother teaching me to bake her hot water sponge cake. How we whipped the egg whites with the electric mixer until stiff peaks formed. How she warned me not to allow a single thread of yolk to taint the white, or the cake would fail. To fold white into yolk-sugar-flour was slow, patient. She let me carve a wedge with the rubber spatula, drop it to the batter's surface, then lift from the bowl's bottom up and over the dollop, turning it in. Warned me never to beat or mix or even stir—the cake would fall. Once, dinking around, I stuck a wooden spoon into the still-whirring beaters, bent the metal, splintered the spoon into the batter. Once I cut her grandmother's precious lace for a doll's clothes, and she cried, the savaged pieces draped across her wrists. So many times I tried to shove my peasant feet into her dainty pumps, hand into her evening gloves. One spoon at a time, that first thin layer drawn across the airy white forming a little hill. Folding only just enough. The batter growing lighter by increments. It was mostly space we folded in, taming down the cloy. It was never so good as then, licked off the finer, the cake itself, to me, disappointing, layers smeared with homemade jam, topped with a stiff merengue. Never so good as then, her instructing, trying to domesticate my impertinence, teach me a little grace, me resisting, the sweet on my tongue dissolving so easily in that state of matter. Never so good as straight from the Pyrex bowl. Never so gentle as the slide of batter into an angel food pan. The rest up to her, what she created from the baked version, brown on top and bottom. Here I am, decades later sitting uner the halogen of a full moon, and that moment, which was many folded into one, is so pure and specific, the sugar sharp on my tongue, the spatula pushing as if through an undertow. My mother taught me to fold. Never so sweet as now. We were incorporating lightness into a deep bowl. As some bird—probably an owl out hunting—chacks its was across the lawn, sounding like a key chain, and now the garden sprinkler comes on, so I know it's 6:00 a.m. There's the first hint of dawn slow-dissolving one more night. This is a fifty- year-old love. It's heavy, so I fold in moonlight, the sound of water spattered on leaves. Dim stars, bright moon— our lives. The cake imperfect, but finished. —12.17.2013

Bless something small but infinite and quiet. There are senses make an object in their simple feeling for one. Originally appeared in the February 1966 issue of Poetry magazine.

Every half century, the synchronous flowering of bamboo causes famine in parts of India. May we blossom every fifty years without afflicting the people. May our seedpods nourish rodents who roam our groves without rebuking lands with famine. May sweet potatoes and rice save us. May ginger and turmeric flourish to the bitter distaste of rats while tresses of bamboo flowers changeling white wasps load the groves with seed in rare perennial synchrony. May our sisters flower en masse hundreds of square miles apart in the pale night. May our shoots pray a silent vision of healing, our rhizome-laden memories: Yes, we share our hunger only once on this earth, my love. Let us bless our fruit and multiply.