Prayer 2

No one wants another paean to a rosy dawn,

so it's good this one's bluish, baby-shade

at the horizon, bleeding up into midnight like

a botched dye job.

And having enough of the old world—larks,

crakes, nightingales, storks—this space

is populated by one fly crabbing

across a notebook page. He seems, like me,

honey-slowed by winter's shortest days, clumsy

and isolated. My love bought a black-and-white

photo once, close-up of a birch trunk,

fly crawling up

the curled paper bark, marring the purity

of the image. You don't notice the fly

until you do, and then you can't stop.

No one wants a fly in art,

but there it is, elegantly framed.

And we're over the epic, so here, first thing

this morning, a pedestrian quarrel. Years ago, I flew

across a mountain range in black coat

and black boots to secretly meet him

in the city. How many dawns did it take to arrive

at this particular? At 9:30 the sky flares

not like flame—a paper fan

you buy in Chinatown for a dollar.

A sudden breeze sways the Tibetan flags strung along

the eaves. I never noticed how thin

the fabric. You can see right through the printed prayers

to the thermometer—

five degrees—and beyond, birches leaning

all to windward. Sun bleaches out

the last mysterious. Now we pray to the real.

—11.29.2012

Source: Prayer in Wind (Boreal Books, 2015)