Prayers in Boxes (an unfinished poem)

This poem is unfinished.  It's a recent piece and will likely be revised many times before I am satisfied that it's finished.  But I wanted to share it anyway.

Prayers in Boxes

My hands,
once supple and strong,
now aged and aching,
life dusty books from their shelves,
fit them carefully into boxes,
tape them closed,
label them with a black Sharpie,
the smell of which slices through
the smell of dust and mold
and love grown old.

There are cobwebs in my hair
and tears in my throat.

On one shelf,
alongside books about writing,
I find the prayer journal I made him
I-don’t-remember-how-many years ago.
I flip through its yellowed pages,
touched that he kept it all this while,
and at the same time so aware
he never wrote a word
on those carefully crafted pages.

That was the problem all along,
of course,
I realize
as I tuck the journal into a box
with other books
and seal the top with tape.

Totems

We must make totems of ourselves,

carve our faces and our hands into hardwood poles.

We must sculpt ourselves from clay, from stone.

How else will the gods find us?

They must know us by our bodies,

by our hands.

Standing in a River

You stand in a river and thirst.

You are up to your knees in truth and goodness,

up to your knees in the light

yet your eyes remain fixed on darkness.

It’s not about who you slept with

in the back of a Chevy when you were sixteen.

It’s not about the time you stole

a bottle of wine from the Seven-Eleven.

It’s not about the lies and the anger and the spiteful words.

It’s about the light inside.  The love and the holiness.

And if you’re not careful, the current will drag you under

and pull you out to sea.

Praying in the Mission Church

Her face is like a pecan,

shelled and weathered.

Her legs are the roots of a cypress tree,

bent a little at the knees, but still strong.

She walks three miles to the mission church,

kneels at a pew in the back row to pray.

She prays for her son, that he might stop living

at the bottom of a bottle.

She prays for her daughter,

who long ago left for the iron city.

She prays for the child she lost in the winter of ’25.

The dusty light from the small high window

wraps around her like a blanket.

Heaven

The sun hangs like a yolk in the sky,

a sky that has cracked open

that we may look upon heaven.

prayers

somewhere south of heaven

the moon crawls across the sky,
our prayers over her shoulder