Preferring Praying

You moaning, accelerating, while behind you I grunt and thrust, one hand on the small of your back, the other on your hip holding up the skirt you made with cloth your mother bought in Greece last summer. I make coffee in the dark, listening to the rain, letting the world of men with their guns crumble at last. The Lord's visits intensify - beginning around midnight and extending well into the dawn. I'm exhausted and happy and only sometimes given to the wordiness that so long insisted on defining me. What is the world but the constraints to which we consent before knowing what it means to say yes? I soften inside you, unwilling to separate, listening to you catch your breath. How efficient we are between kitchen and pantry, garden and hay loft. You kiss me after, beads of sweat on your upper lip grazing my cheek. All this for what? The Nameless One who does not pass, who asks nothing and takes nothing? How generous the Lord is, leaving me bibles, Emily Dickinson poems, and science. Playing, preferring, praying. How grateful I am for the familiar ritual, how comforting our shared penetration of the veil.