Prayer for a Monday

Give us a lonely, pointless place
Where nothing much of nothing much
Is ever really going on,

Not a wilderness or a town
Or a suburb, unless it’s gone
Bust and the stucco’s flaking off.

Give us an out of the way place,
Half ugly and half abandoned,
Where a few locals come to fish

But don’t catch much of anything,
Where there’s maybe a pit toilet
With a spider in one corner,

Or a drop-off spot for garbage
That a truck picks up once a week,
But also some half-hearted views,

As well, a lot of sky, some woods,
Scruffy and with some trash in them,
But densely branched and home to birds.

Not good enough to brag about
Living in, hiking through, touring,
Or even briefly visiting,

Give us where the wind’s no contest
And small waves lap at crumbled shore,
Empty, more or less. Call us blessed.

Of the Gray-Brown Bird

The thrush, the hermit
Watched him carrying
His wildflower bouquets,

Tramping through the woods
Just outside of town,
Staggering a bit

In recovery,
Wild-bearded old man
Chanting to himself.

What did the bird care?
It needed to sing.
The old man knew that,

And knew what it sang,
And chanted it back,
This time with meaning.

Not a Word

There’s an argument, a good one,
That consolation requires hope.
Respectfully, we disagree.

Hope and meaning are entangled
As tumbling eagles, and they can
Look like consolation against

The blinding sun. Ask Walt Whitman.
But the greatest consolation,
The most valuable, breaks apart

From the living passions giving
Absorbing reasons to behave
As if you hadn’t been grieving.

If you are possessed by meaning
And hope, you are engaged to life,
Too busy for consolation

Most of the time. Consolation
Must be more more than a portmanteau
Filled with spare supplies of meaning

And tightly packed reasons for hope.
Let life be random, death certain,
Meaning mere human invention—

Then what? Give us consolation
When you can’t give us any hope,
And we will be truly consoled.

Let us be overwhelmed and sad
As Dahlia Ravikovitch
Seeking after her lost father

Who was killed, but no one told her.
Don’t shroud such absence in meanings
And threadbare narratives of hope.

Such consolation as she got,
She got by staring down that road
Where, she later learned, he’d been killed.

If there’s any consolation
It has to embrace the absence
That can’t speak. Let us be that road.

Thinking in Thin Air

All sorts of ways
Low oxygen
Can damage you
And your dense brain.

Thin air’s a risk
Factor for strokes,
Foolish thinking,
Impulsive acts.

Maybe practice
That challenge, then.
Get way up there,
Theologian

Of the godless
Atmosphere where,
If you don’t faint
First, you see clear.

Four Years Ago in a Watched Chair in a Locked and Lamplit, Windowless Room All Night and into Invisible Morning

Take the implement too soft

And flexible they give you,

The only thing they give you,

Because anything too sharp

Or sturdy’s potentially

Dangerous to your soft flesh,

Because you are here because

You have tried to end yourself.

You might try to hurt yourself.

There’s nothing here to tempt you.

You can have water and light,

A blanket with your armchair,

But no communication

With any world but this room,

No distractions for tonight.

So you write. Page after page

Of cheap, lined paper filling

With your scrawls in blue ballpoint.

They encourage you to write,

Thinking that, unlike reading,

Or conversing with confreres,

Or obsessively screening—

To say nothing of drinking,

Pill-popping, playing with fire—

Writing is therapeutic.

That’s as may be, but if true,

You’ve long been deep in the throes

Of therapeutic illness.

You are calm in the lamplight,

Still, uncomplaining patient.

They have given you the tool

Of your transfiguration,

Destruction, and salvation.

You write like you breathe and breathe

Softly as you write all night,

Clutching your midnight disease.

Years later, you will read these

And smile to yourself alone.

How to last? Weave. Unweave. Weave.

Mama

You’re a lunged biped, therefore
Lunged bipedality must
Be possible in this world,

Inherently. You’re alive
And metabolize, therefore
Life and metabolism

Inhere in the world, somehow.
You’re linguistic and conscious,
Therefore and et cetera.

You wouldn’t say the world is
A lunged bipedal mammal
Because such a thing can be.

Yet you long to consider
The world as living; you long
To consider it conscious.