72 Prayer poems

What was it we wanted to say anyhow, like today when there were all the letters in my alphabet soup and suddenly the ‘j’ rises to the surface. The ‘j’, a letter that might be great for Scrabble, but not really used for much else, unless we need to jump for joy, and then all of a sudden it’s there and ready to help us soar and to open up our hearts at the same time, this simple line with a curved bottom, an upside down cane that helps us walk in a new way into this forest of language, where all the letters are beginning to speak, finding each other in just the right combination to be understood.

Let it come down: these thicknesses of air have long enough walled love away from love; stillness has hardened until words despair of their high leaps and kisses shut themselves back into wishing. Crippled lovers lie against a weather which holds out on them, waiting, awaiting some shrill sign, some cry, some screaming cat that smells a sacrifice and spells them thunder. Start the mumbling lips, syllable by monotonous syllable, that wash away the sullen griefs of love and drown out knowledge of an ancient war— o, ill-willed dark, give with the sound of rain, let love be brought to ignorance again. Originally appeared in the March 1964 issue of Poetry magazine.

The light snow started late last night and continued all night long while I slept and could hear it occasionally enter my sleep, where I dreamed my brother was alive again and possessing the beauty of youth, aware that he would be leaving again shortly and that is the lesson of the snow falling and of the seeds of death that are in everything that is born: we are here for a moment of a story that is longer than all of us and few of us remember, the wind is blowing out of someplace we don’t know, and each moment contains rhythms within rhythms, and if you discover some old piece of your own writing, or an old photograph, you may not remember that it was you and even if it was once you, it’s not you now, not this moment that the synapses fire and your hands move to cover your face in a gesture of grief and remembrance.

Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age, God's breath in man returning to his birth, The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r, Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear, The six-days world transposing in an hour, A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear; Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss, Exalted manna, gladness of the best, Heaven in ordinary, man well drest, The milky way, the bird of Paradise, Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood, The land of spices; something understood.

And as to the poets — it is those straying in Evil that follow them: Do you not see that they wander about bewildered in every valley? And that they say what they practice not? — Qur’an 26:224–226 The man I confused Allah for speaks into the microphone while the angels on my shoulders chew a mouthful of my hair. I wake up to a severed goat head and look at it hard enough to remember the animal in its entirety, a functional thing. The Saudis have built skyscrapers taller than the mountains in Makkah. This is a sign of the apocalypse; we worry with our backs to each other and look for Isa in the faces of men who appear to spin gold straight from the guttural source. 
I repeat the word mustaqbil like a new prayer; when the dog barks at a brick wall mustaqbil, when anemones collapse back into gothic buds mustaqbil, when I wet my arms to my elbows in the sink mustaqbil. All while Israfil kicks his feet against a stone wall and cleans his trumpet with each utterance. In the village, three men dragged a boy into our orchards and beat him to a pulp. The woman who eloped was strangled and thrown into the river. Pickpockets robbed the mourners at my uncle’s funeral —mustaqbil mustaqbil mustaq— my throat is infected by the thick-tongued promise; each night diluted into its prior belly. I use language to build the gardens I’m destined to be expelled from, each imagined rose rendered true.

Nature remains faithful by natural light, only. Immeasurable, invisible in the wind. Visible when blades and branches bend. The wind speaks fluent rain. Despite it the rain falls straight. And beyond it abandoned barns defend abandoned men.

I May the Name send its hidden radiance to open the gates of deliverance to His servants—and shine in their hearts, which now are shut in silent darkness. May the great King be moved to act in perfection and righteousness— to open the gates of wisdom for us and waken the love of old, the love of ancient days. ii

Our Father who art in heaven, I am drunk. Again. Red wine. For which I offer thanks. I ought to start with praise, but praise comes hard to me. I stutter. Did I tell you about the woman whom I taught, in bed, this prayer? It starts with praise; the simple form keeps things in order. I hear from her sometimes. Do you? And after love, when I was hungry, I said,Make me something to eat. She yelled, Poof! You’re a casserole!—and laughed so hard she fell out of the bed. Take care of her. Next, confession—the dreary part. At night deer drift from the dark woods and eat my garden. They’re like enormous rats on stilts except, of course, they’re beautiful. But why? What makes them beautiful? I haven’t shot one yet. I might. When I was twelve, I’d ride my bike out to the dump and shoot the rats. It’s hard to kill your rats, our Father. You have to use a hollow point and hit them solidly. A leg is not enough. The rat won’t pause. Yeep! Yeep! it screams, and scrabbles, three-legged, back into the trash, and I would feel a little bad to kill something that wants to live more savagely than I do, even if it’s just a rat. My garden’s vanishing. Perhaps I’ll merely plant more beans, though that might mean more beautiful and hungry deer. Who knows? I’m sorry for the times I’ve driven home past a black, enormous, twilight ridge. Crested with mist, it looked like a giant wave about to break and sweep across the valley, and in my loneliness and fear I’ve thought, O let it come and wash the whole world clean. Forgive me. This is my favorite sin: despair— whose love I celebrate with wine and prayer. Our Father, thank you for all the birds and trees, that nature stuff. I’m grateful for good health, food, air, some laughs, and all the other things I’m grateful that I’ve never had to do without. I have confused myself. I’m glad there’s not a rattrap large enough for deer. While at the zoo last week, I sat and wept when I saw one elephant insert his trunk into another’s ass, pull out a lump, and whip it back and forth impatiently to free the goodies hidden in the lump. I could have let it mean most anything, but I was stunned again at just how little we ask for in our lives.Don’t look! Don’t look! Two young nuns tried to herd their giggling schoolkids away.Line up, they called.Let’s go and watch the monkeys in the monkey house.

No one kneads us again out of earth and clay, no one incants our dust. No one. Blessèd art thou, No One. In thy sight would we bloom. In thy spite. A Nothing we were, are now, and ever shall be, blooming: the Nothing-, the No-One's-Rose. With our pistil soul-bright, our stamen heaven-waste, our corona red from the purpleword we sang over, O over the thorn.

With coals of juniper, Lord, with ripped willow clumps, with lodge-pole pine and fir, with wind-wrack and slash, I kindle an all-night fire to mirror You. No longer waning, no longer falsifying chimes. No longer smoking out rot, or eclipsing Yeshiva scholars. No Lord I know what is within magnified. Stars will just have to wait to eddy through gates of night. Little swirl, mimicking nebulae, mimicking galaxies, which turns for no apparent reason other than to cast and recast the whole as it whirs and whirls, knocks and ticks at three am in a snit to proclaim itself not as You but it in You. If I can strut a note, can rack wobbly pins, balance rocks into signposts, waves into a grass mass or two, it will hear itself structuring time. This oddly chopped watched dimension quarters us into early middle late. Each day scans and wanes, some hope knowing its moaning is mourning what it erases. The and stamped by the sea each second. Be with it and what it erases ceases to toll.