77 Spirituality poems

Ruffs are optional for trebles in Anglican church choirs. — Wikipedia Bored in the balcony reading your novel hoping it will keep me awake — religion was always a blind spot — with my Sunday headache waiting for the service to finish so I can retrieve my little chorister, no god in us but song, while pale important teenage Sophia in blue head chorister ribbon, face dumpy as a Flemish burgomaster, bosses littler kids and loves leading them expressionless in paired rows from the choir stalls, holding the processional cross high, shushing and huffily eyeing them for babyish disregard of cleanly neatness, my own chorister dripping orts of tissues she stows in her sleeves for sniffles, in the choir room struggles out of her ruff ringed dark brown inside from years of child chorister sweat, hair oil, dead skin. Me:Your other ruff was white and clean! Her:Sophia said it was too big. She gave me this one instead. I showed her it was dirty and tight. She said “deal with it.”

Ashen face, wool hat bobbing, the young boy’s eyes dart to me, then up at the man pulling a rolling suitcase, whose hand he holds, then back at me. His legs move as if without gravity. The man asks: Do you know a church on this street that serves free food? I want to say I know. That the names of churches on an Avenue called Americas roll out of me. I want to tell you it is temporary, their condition: suitcase, darting eyes, seeking free food at 9 pm in a big city on a school night. I want to tell you I don’t for a moment wonder if that is really the boy’s father or uncle or legitimate caretaker — something in the handholding and eyes, having watched too many episodes of Law and Order. I want to tell you I take them to a restaurant and pay for a warm meal or empty my wallet not worrying how offensive that might be because in the end hunger is hunger. I want to tell you I call someone who loves them — that there is someone — and say your guys are lost, can you come? I want to tell you I sit down on the sidewalk at the corner of Waverly and pray — that all passing by, anonymous shoes marking the pavement, join in a chorus of prayer humming like cicadas in the Delta. I want to tell you the boy and the man eat food encircled by the warmth of bodies. I want to turn the cold night into a feast. I will tell you I am praying.

O my Lord, the stars glitter and the eyes of men are closed. Kings have locked their doors and each lover is alone with his love. Here, I am alone with You.

O my Lord, if I worship you from fear of hell, burn me in hell. If I worship you from hope of Paradise, bar me from its gates. But if I worship you for yourself alone, grant me then the beauty of your Face.

Of all that God has shown me I can speak just the smallest word, Nor more than a honey bee Takes on his foot From an overspilling jar.

After “E. 1999 Eternal” by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony Dear god of armed robberies and puff-puff-pass, a chalk outline unpeels from the street, smashes every windshield, and leaves florid temples of crack on porches. Burnt-black pleats of   joint-pressed lips prophesied your return. Please accept these nickel bags as offerings. Brick bastions of piss-stench thresholds and boarded windows require a weekly sacrifice. Is there a Tarot card called “The Corner,” a shrike shown lifting a corpse from the pike of a middle finger? Children speak to their murdered brothers with a cereal box and construction paper cut into a Ouija’s tongue that licks yes when asked if   liquor could polish a skull in a way pleasing to the dead, licks no when asked for a name.

If our view were not a Holiday Inn but a fringe of trees, I could say G here is our greenly hidden. If we lived amid Joe-Pye weed and high grass instead of spackle and peeling plaster I could say perhaps I’m listening to G now but mean the owl, a wind playing the silo, a sticking sorrow, any sound but the snore of our latest visitor on the futon. Dear G, please make him turn, make me kinder. I’m not far from unfathoming it all.

She tells him she's leaving him and he bakes a pie. His pies are exquisite, their crusts like crinoline. He doesn't change clothes, works in slacks, shirtsleeves rolled. Summer makes the kitchen unbearable but he suffers beautifully, tenderly cuts the strawberries, pours into the deep curve of the bowl. She hadn't missed his hands since last they drew her to his body. Now she watches them stroke the edges of the dough, shape it like cooling glass. When the oven opens, his brow drips, he brings his hands to his face.

When a creature dies ... the flesh and soft parts of the body rot quickly. All that is left are the bones and teeth. (textbook entry on ‘fossils’) Sometimes. You, mother, dying, left what was hard first: bones weeping into your veins like flutes, teeth vanished on some hospital lunch tray. In your last mute days you parted with one more hard thing: the gold ring I was to save for my child. As your hand offered that bright circle (only seen as a whole now, when empty) did your thoughts reach, like mine, for your first wedding ring? You took that one off when I was seven or eight and sent it spinning from a car window. I can still feel the wet blades of grass slipping through my fingers, night dew coming on, you and father loud in the parked car. I searched there as if life spilled from a ring that lay somewhere out of sight but within reach, hid where only the crickets knew. I took the scraping of their mating calls for crying, as if they shared loss—my childish heart consoled by a soft ‘as if.’ The consolation carries on: their song (light as air, softer than voices) plays through my thoughts about that evening and fills the lost ring’s hollow with life’s most lasting part, cries for new love.

Wounded Knee Years since I’d been back to the memorial; I’d forgotten it was up on a rise above the killing ground. Two kids appeared in the dust with things to sell—once coming from the far end of the chain-link, two kinds of dream-catchers hanging from his arm; and the girl, hunched on the broken steps under the arch’s improbable cross, cradling a Tupperware bowl of beaded star-necklaces in her lap. Her pink- and-silver t-shirt read PRINCESS. I shut my car door, and a grouse startled off the fence, veered away over bent switchgrass. The girl— Allie—said her little sisters made the jewelry, in the gray house at the base of the hill; maybe her price included the pictures I walked behind her to take: the marker for 1890, then the more recent graves, in ground seared and hardpanned by wind and snow and desolation; tied, bandana-pouches of tobacco, and ribbons, like fists and fingers shifting and fluttering; a few tough bright flowers left; gray-blue sky rolling above to the edges of horizon all around, spitting, cooking up a storm. I stood and turned back toward the arch again, where Allie and her friend, if he was a friend, hadn’t spoken a word to one another. For the first time in my life I wished I’d had some cigarettes— to smoke with them, at least offer, something to do with strangers you might sit a while beside till maybe one of you thought of something to say. A little thunder crackled, and we said goodbye; I drove on toward the shaft of rain above Manderson.  No reason to think I’d be any memory to them; a dream- catcher sold, a brilliant blue necklace. I passed a knocked-over vote Democrat sign, and two younger kids working on a bike upside-down, and remembered the small bowls, empty now, brought and offered at the graves surrounded for miles by graves never found. Rain would fill them, lift the reservoirs, clear the air. I thought of reaching over to pop the camera-back open; turned from dirt onto narrow blacktop, the road out, that was steaming.