Possible Answers to Prayer

by Scott Cairns

Your petitions—though they continue to bear

just the one signature—have been duly recorded.

Your anxieties—despite their constant,

relatively narrow scope and inadvertent

entertainment value—nonetheless serve

to bring your person vividly to mind.

Your repentance—all but obscured beneath

a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more

conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.

Your intermittent concern for the sick,

the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes

recognizable to me, if not to them.

Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly

righteous indignation toward the many

whose habits and sympathies offend you—

these must burn away before you’ll apprehend

how near I am, with what fervor I adore

precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.

Glass Panic

He remembered—or he thought he remembered
maybe he just remembered the stories—
the time when he was two and was locked in the car
the faces of giants at every angle trying to set him free
his mother screaming silently just outside the glass—
fear confusion heat—
they broke the glass but it didn’t shatter—
put your head down cover your face baby—
all the pieces stayed together
a transparent jigsaw puzzle
the man punched it and broke through
the air came in
cool.

He remembered it for only a second at the sink
—I’m cracking up spinning out—
metaphors come to the insane
there was no logic here
—hold my breath no breathe—
all he had to do was the dishes
he fell to the floor
plate after plate fell
hurled their china shards in a spiral across the yellow linoleum
red dots across the sunny yellow—
he had wanted hard wood but—
Someone had to get in
past the panic
punch through
—insignificant so major—
Jesus come cool inside

She held his head
to keep glass
from
shattering

not knowing
it had to break
to let in air.

Theology

originally published in Lost Beat Poetry


Satan:
If I knew then what I know now,
I would still defy them,
Shaking my fist at the one who
Birthed and bound me,
Oedipus to his Laius.
Jocasta freedom was my lover.
And the hatred he bore toward me…

“I am Love” and in the same breath,
“I am a Jealous God,”
The politician creator spoke.

And I laughed as he launched me
Through time and space.


Michael:
There are some things worth fighting for
That run deeper than brotherhood.
You were the light,
The luminous one by which I saw to fight.
Made of the same cosmic molecules as I,
You took a road forbidden.

And I cried as you fell
Through time and space.

Abraham's Sky

from Ain't Milton: a chapbook of poetry

And He took him outside and said, "Now look toward the heavens, and count the stars, if you are able to count them." And He said to him, "So shall your descendantas be." Genesis 15:5

At that moment,
That present moment touching eternity
When the ancient one peered, invited, into the Eastern sky
And viewed through tears his promised progeny
And saw the stars infinitely spread
Like sand of angel's sandals
Across the carpet night,

At that moment
Did one star shine for me?

Was it a fire primeval quenched
Whose light, from creation's infancy had traveled
Through history's depths to greet the father on that night,
A beacon from an empty void?
Cold.
Dead.
Silent.

Or was his eye distracted
By a maverick,
A comet renegade too rebellioius to revel in the sky,
Abandoning the joyous dance of Heaven
To drink the richness of the muddy soil,
Exchanging ecstasy for pain,
All for dramatic brilliance?

Instead I, his spiritual offspring, hope to be
A flicker
So unperceivably small in the silence of space,
Perhaps in the corner far behind Abraham,
Out of his glance,
A pulsing fragile sliver of light,
A fractured piece of celestial diamond
Content to serve its simple purpose
Of lighting a tiny corridor of Night.

"It's Not Real"

With three words, I refused the pretend soup held in her cupped hands;
I assassinated her imaginary friend as if he were a threat to me;
I took the delicate, tiny shells of imagination she hid away and
Pulverized them into sodium pentothal powder.

I am exiled from Never-Never Land,
And I am no longer a tourist in Avalon.
But there was no need for such adult cruelty
To strike the cheeks of one so young and innocent.