“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions…. We should all be wearing crash helmets.” ………………….Annie Dillard, “An Expedition to the Pole”
It’s Communion time so my daughter plays Her first-person shooter game. Pretty good. Her brother sucks
A sippy cup. Kids are rough. Amiri Baraka says He saw his daughter pray into her hands so bang he wrote
A twenty-volume suicide note. For me, nice job would have done. But that’s me.
We pray for nuns, increase in priests, and what sounds like our own Attention. (I invent half of what I should have heard.
If everything were sacred, we wouldn’t need the word.) Now is the time to eat, drink, and be very alone.
Glory be to God for dappled things. I read high windows. I worry and sing
For Italians, the past, or whatever stained the glass My son can’t comprehend.
People are leaving. Have we come to the end? Of art and work and all of the above? Of carpentry and cults?
Now there’s an ADHD prescription for adults. Everyone’s happy. The pope told the atheists good luck.
But I’m not so certain. I smart. I doubt Anyone will enter under my roof. I’ll probably be out.
Or worse: in. Once, I lived in sin
But now she’s gone. They’re playing that same old song I only remember by singing along. Freud had it wrong
But not Whitman. There must be great audiences. I take my chances.
But what have I fathered forth? The fickle and freckled, God knows how. I see in her her mother, how her chestnut hair falls down.
He practices counting by counting the ones who receive. When they will not come to be counted,
She counts the holes they leave. Jesus was a bastard but he wasn’t a motherless child.
Girls have gone wild. And blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.
The nuns taught us there are two ways through life: The way of nature or you can marry a good wife.
And when you pray it’s best not to use your own thoughts. Who else’s? Amiri Baraka’s. Frank O’Hara’s, who never thought
There was something spiritual about being happy. There is because it doesn’t last.
Once there was no month but May. Q. How long has it been? A. A month of Sundays.
That was fast. The quick are gone and now the slow. You’d think that absence is one way to know
For sure there’s nothing going on. You’re wrong. The lights turn off. The dark clicks on.
This is when we love the most: How the quiet deepens like a coast.
In the game of the father and the son It’s the daughter’s turn to find them. It’s fun.
We stay here just as long as we can. We hide-and-seek. We peek-a-boo.
Man hands on mysteries to man. I don’t mean to but I do.