Some Recitations

Some Recitations

(“Keep praying. Pay attention when you offer prayers of thanksgiving.” Colossians 4:2)

I woke with my face frozen in hot anxiety,
the result of hard dreams between fitful waking;
a conflict, a comrade, the nightmare lasted only moments,
but went on well into the night.

I woke with time emptied; full of iron and snow,
unknowing and dissonant angles meeting like arrows
shot from the basement of my brain toward full consciousness.

I woke with my face leaden but wanting stained glass panes
between the outlines of the day. Where do I take my complaints
when pain repeats itself like half-tone chords in percussive polyglot?

I left my place in faith and now it feels I’ve climbed the apex of foolishness.
I stay a few steps from home while my mind wanders the prairies and
rivers,
the buttes and blizzards, the pow-wows and county fairs,
the dares and know-how of a more convinced mood and time.

My mind wanders to the places where I sat with friends the best,
ate their bread, drank their coffee, laughed, cried, argued-prayed,
relied on their couch, drank of their confidence, and occasionally

Doubted together what we so loudly professed.

I am thankful for the slim faith, the uncertainty and shyness
that kept us begging for heaven while planted on the ground.

I am thankful that gravity was heavy today and kept the atmosphere
so close I could smell each molecule, feel the air of a birdwing leaping
from the peak of a roof.

I am weary today and should be thankful I have no jobs to do,
no schedules to keep. But I can’t keep from thinking that someone
will pop by, lie back in the chair and just say

“I needed this.”

I am thankful God does not take my melancholy as a sign of
diffidence,
but merely the way I’m made; the way His hands molded the
folds and fissures of my brain. There is a chance of rain,
the summer weighs more than the spring, and life keeps on
rolling past my expectations.

I am thankful some recitations mean simply what they mean.