What did we get, in the morning

Did you ever wonder, in winter,
a hypothesis contrary to fact,
what it would be like
in the cold
if prayer were not a possibility,
not known,
the heart -- an old ice,
and any story, an impossibility,
and grace an unhistorical act:

this is the leaden thunder
of winter.

We are all, normally, gnostics, it is the easiest thing
to disavow the possibilities,
to disbelieve the rock at the stubbing of the toe,
to disprove the story's extension into meaning, or even into the next moment,
to discard the lover for the sake of ecstasy.

The fetish mist has its charms,
the faceless, nameless, placeless coruscations
of the blizzard night
asks only one thing:
"How do you feel."
"What do you think?"
"Think/feel?"

It's all the same.

The faces, in the fetish mist may just be a mirage,
a figment, an archetype,
something that will go away nicely,
like the rolling credits at the end of a nightmare:
"It was just the rigatoni, acid reflux,
surely that thump under the bumper
was not what I thought it was."

Ecstasy has its price.

Prayer is hard in the opium dens.

Trees are easy to see in the snow.

Prayer, that white feathered cloud and dancing nautilus,
winter snow devil in the night forgotten waste,
where prayer was said to be naught,
is promised

as a possibility

by the Incarnation in the mist,
the collapse of the sine wave
and rendering of gnostic ambiguity

into one word.

My prayer settles upon the limbs of a tree,
feathers, flocked white
on the structure

of the evergreen. 

Comments

[Ceolfrith]

Wonderful! Thank you.

[ochlophobist]

Beautiful.

[HK]

Can prayer melt another's cold heart? Where does prayer and grace end and see will begin? Praying for others sometimes feels like an impossible task.

[Fr Jonathan]

A poem's problem is chiefly that the deficiencies of its writing often obfuscates its real point.

Nevertheless, it is always hard to pray for others when one goes beyond what the Lord advised, which to pray simply for mercy.

As He did, and accomplished, on the Cross.