What runs through me could hardly be called piety.
It’s not patience either, at least not by that name.
The pasture’s dissolution into darkness,
the cow gnawing obediently without notion of infinity
and stars—God, you know all about them.
Those evenings I was sure I’d die,
you were teaching me to live; I see that now.
And the gravity of all you did not say
but left me like a map for the intuiting.
Slowly, I saw the world for what it was,
or was it I who grew familiar, that long
habit of me? These were the pains
I was granted in this life: my face in cold weather,
a thrumming near the temples. And because
these occasionally left me, all secondary anguish,
I modeled on Yours: I swam in perpetual
end of spring knowing no summer could come of it,
used the same shears to trim a leaf of poison
and its remedy; I knew enough to know what I was doing.
So often I thought that I was clever, God,
and could see the spirit moving within me
like a school of fish darting under ice.
In the lit-up scan of my left breast,
bright dashes of calcium the beautiful doctor
used her needle to guide out of me.
A metal marker forever near my heart, my mother’s heart,
her mother’s—we are alive, and now, and still.
I’ll tell you something I’ve never told a God:
all my life, I’ve been ready for a fight, been ready
for suffering. All my allowances came and spent
and all the coffers magically replenished.
Why galaxies, God? The fit of one palm inside
another? This ache of once—I know, I know.
Not piety: let me earn what I’ve got already.
my only prayer, let this be enough.
