You Speak to Me

You Speak to Me

(“Then he (Jesus) went up on a mountain where he could be alone and pray. Later that evening, he was still there.” Matthew 14:23)

I don’t think I could stay there all night,
in fact, I tried once, and ended up eating donuts before dawn.
There is so much power,
so much I could tell if only I could keep my feet
on the final swell from midnight till daylight.
I don’t know why I could not stay longer
with the one who,
I don’t know why,
loved me. But my mind is a prison

Of carousels and mosquitos that demand my attention.
I could excuse my thinnest moments on Your invisibility,
yet I can imagine the length and breadth of love or passion,
debates and conversations that never end. Arguments I’ll
never resolve
play merry-go-round, beginning, end, middle and then
starting someplace or other again. And the insects gnaw at
my best intentions; buzzing like radar, stinging like zeroes
and biting the truth in two.

Yet the moments when, at last, the mechanics of my mind
brake uphill and stop turning, when the gates have closed and
all conversation ceases, the quiet is dense as chocolate cream.
Frightening silence when half a newspaper, swirled by the breeze,
interrupts my reverie. The moments when the firing neurons
take their nap and leave my tiny spirit alone, the whisper of truth
which had hovered there all along, takes me hostage untethered
to a hiding place of lucidness, a cavern lit from within;

Those are when, a minute, an hour now hardly matter. For
I have heard the words I quivered to know,
thought myself unworthy to know,
and bow down, or leap up, or walk about or seek the star;
all are the delight of the solitary moments when
You speak to me.