The Recitations of Love

The Recitations of Love

(“Fools make fun of guilt, but the godly acknowledge it and seek reconciliation.” Proverbs 14:9)

He wanted to jot his emotions down before
the ink dried on the page. They were fleeting but heavy,
they were deep and they were noisy.
He had learned to be impatient about the past
indiscretions. He once thought he had a gift
for painting the unknowable but discovered the
colors ran faster than his brushstrokes could keep up.
He leaned on what he had learned to love, the daily way
his inclinations moved his heart. He knew, and would
try to remember, that prayer was nothing more than
unspoken breaths caught on the dawn of a pink and
orange morning.

He captured his pain, the reminders of how little he gained
from underneath the burdens of tripping and falling where
he wished he had stood strong. The past was a long arc
that followed him down the halls and around the alleys
like corner store bullies waiting after school.
He walked around the block searching for a new place
to bury the thoughts that haunted his steps from day
to the midnight at the end of the week.

But if he stopped for just a moment, if he stood still
and let the light bleed into his eyes, he could hear the
words that started with a look and drew him closer than
he thought he deserved. They were indelible and could
not be erased.
He learned to listen again to the recitations of love,
the mystery that turned upon the timing of the ancient of days.
He could not deny the past, but he no longer needed to
die every day. He replayed the liturgy that played like
a butterfly near his shame and dread. He smiled again and
began again to pace himself in and out of his heirloom of
life.

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.