I Miss the Small Spaces

I Miss the Small Spaces

(“For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of Yahweh’s glory, as the waters cover the sea.” Habakkuk 2:14)

Hovering above the terrain of a thousand different
portraits
I wonder what the next face will bring.
Would you believe I was a dark horse?
Would you believe I’ve survived more undercover
obstacles, I’ve beat the odds too many times.
Now my inhibitions are stronger; I only dance on
command. I’ve slipped through the grasp of more
midnights than I can count. I’ve lasted
well past my expiration date.

That is not to say the world is more sluggish,
or the air full of flood and mud. It merely means
I miss the small spaces between us. I long for
something longer than hello and goodbye, something
stronger than a quick snack from the kitchen.

You don’t receive red ribbons for barely escaping
with your skin unburned. No one celebrates the days
you spend five minutes singing before the rain. But sometimes
the fog can hold you as near the ground of your being
as a day without uncarpeted skies. They all serve to convince me
my debts are paid manifold.

When the table was set there were more places than there
were
chairs. Never mind. Sitting on the floor is easier on the
back-log
of unfinished conversations. There are too many stops
in our talks
and not enough commas. Incomplete as we are,
we could find a place where words land like summer rain
instead of arrows.

All Anyone Wanted

All Anyone Wanted

(“Feast there in the Presence of God, your God. Celebrate everything that you and your families have accomplished under the blessing of God, your God.” Deuteronomy 12:7 [The Message])

 

His choices once were boundless, the wideness of time and
the land spread before him like a queen’s banquet on her
coronation day.

There was nothing to hint in the air or the sky
or the pizza late night games with a dozen young dreamers
and their children fast asleep--
there was nothing to hint that many would not see him again until
he finally was on the ground.

 

How had he fallen among the dark shadows begging for longer hours
and brand new bread? Why was the daylight so slanted,
the help he was handed so ghostly, the glances interpreted
as holes in his shirts and acne in his soul?

 

From the time he hit the dirt until he accepted his
next invitation,
he only sat with children whose sense of invention
held him steady in the embarrassment that his poetry
no longer rhymed. The adults spread out in tables of eight
and he laughed with babies with deviled egg on their faces.

 

There was a cradle that held parts of him
he could not explain. There was a toddler in a playpen
babbling his name. And so he knelt in the corner,
eye to eye with one
who knew the ground as well as he.
He never knew what to say when the one adult
across from him made it two at the table. Words
were stumbling and sometimes stuck sideways
in his throat.

 

But still he craved the fire, still he wanted to go where
the flames wrapped each word with smoked goodness
and the embers never died until well after dawn.

 

He never knew what to say when it was only two
at the table,
but the food they offered, the drink they poured
opened portals of the spirit. The babies and children
laughed harder and the adults did not mind.

 

Eventually he discovered a real live giver,
another breather with his same misgivings and
realized
all anyone wanted was a meal on a paper plate
beside the kitchen door.