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it’s always friday night
thanks to tom your car breaks down, the pipe busts, your kid’s temples grow too hot, your keys get locked in the car, your girl gets arrested, and it’s always friday night. the office is closed. go to the emergency room, go to the after hours extra dollars specialist, wait til monday. we have no further information. it’s friday night and you’re on a cold corner with no coat and no cigarettes. the music from the bar blasts. walk away. jesus is not in a shot glass, or at the bottom of that green bottle. here: your sister on the phone with a number for someone who might know, the locksmith arriving on time, a finally sleeping child, water from the tap. now a neighbor with five bucks, and an extra marlboro red, and matches.
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for mary oliver
it was not long after he died. i was alone in his trailer packing boxes, the light that afternoon was bleach on my hands. i had only been in the place once. he had been embarrassed, in the end, to have ended up alone, in a trailer park, with a silver pickup and a dwindling check. he didn’t want me there. and then on the bulletin board above his desk, a many times folded printout of your poem. he must have kept it in his pocket. wild geese. the heading home in it, the love in it. he was not always good, my father, and i did not always love him. but we both loved that poem, and the world it imagined. i threw the poem away but it sneaks up behind me some mornings when the light is particularly hot and dust dances on my desk. “you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.” i am turning toward the possibility that this is true. a prayer in real time
there are about a million things to speak against: from the definition of ownership to the desecration of the packed dirt, from the definition of borders to the desecration of my own body. words do not erase the ink on the judge’s papers, the surveyor’s lines, the letter stamped on your birth certificate. words do not breathe life back into the ones we love, or back into the days we let slip past. but these words are here to pick the lock, to lift the window. please climb out. i’m coming too. this is a prayer in real time: listen to it in your coughing engine, in that radio commercial, in the hold music. this is a prayer that drowns out your boss and the bill collector and the preacher who sells hell. the world is more than dust and sinew. i call you holy, i call us holy, i call it all holy. |
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August 2020
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