A Country of Blessings and Hymns

Wanted: less weariness. Easier breathing? Well, something other than nothing in these cupped, these containing, hands.

Failing lungs, the lines on my face.

The blind horse steps carefully through mud to reach drier ground on which flakes of hay rest, green and gold. My son and I share space easily in the kitchen, shoulders grazing, not speaking, and I think of how little I knew about my father's body.

Was it fall recently? Was it winter?

And my mother's anger and my mother's hands and my mother's face so often nearer than I wanted it to be.

J. says one nice thing and I end up weepy all day, my heart tremulous like a baby bird, my body a nest in the storm-tossed limbs of the world. 

Pumpkins gleam in November rains. Potatoes yield to recently-sharpened knives.

An ache beginning behind my left eye.

Begin.

My dead uncles in a card game they have yet to learn has neither winner nor loser.

Purgatories, pap smears, panda bears.

Kisses on the back porch.

Yet at four a.m. billows of sleep carried me far from the couch and ratty sleeping bag into a country of blessings and hymns, gold light spilling through an endless afternoon.

Where in your body will I not bring my prayer?

When your people are my people.