Morning prayers

"I don't want to be who you are! I want to be myself, someone playing with language" (Robert Bly)

________

You say, 'Blot out the leaves first, & pray', and so I do creeping along as I have for some fifty years in this insanely cold,very tired or very rhapsodical world..

By praying I can cause the ground to harden— but You, up there with nowhere to go, a star-fetish at best, a sky god who in some twittery way can poke a sparrow-bill

into me anytime & tear like a dying tooth, wherever I go.

And I hear myself pray everyday, to you alone in my car-- 'With eyes like clouds, sun-eager,& wise, see me through'. And the reply's the same: all the leaves turn each into a crow and not just one but a gang of them, who’ll swarm out of a lake & together try to chase me down. And all I see is snow..

You who'd swept the bloom off the first Tree I ever knew, You who’d say and I pray that branches ache with the thrill of fall!

I'd even go for a more blackening swarm to drop stone-fruit

down on me, and even santana winds to turn snow into ash, sweeping the road ahead like a lovely little sacrifice—

even that'd be better than prayer to You a star-fetish, at best

(2008)