March 2018
David Graham
grahamd@ripon.edu
grahamd@ripon.edu
Note: My poems this month continue what is turning out to be my lifelong puzzlement over the largest mysteries, particularly those regarding God, faith, and religion. I was raised in the Episcopal Church, which left an indelible and mostly welcome mark on me in all kinds of ways. But ever since some college courses in religion I’ve mostly teetered uneasily between Atheist and Agnostic. Naturally this puzzlement comes out fairly often in poems. In “Prayer” I found myself remembering, somewhat imperfectly, a quotation from French writer Simone Weil that has been translated as follows: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” “Against God” is part of a series still in progress in which I explore various big themes in a deliberately perverse way: denial, mock-denial, or some mixture of both. Other entries in the series include poems “against” the wind, nostalgia, reality, time, memory, innocence, art, and Walt Whitman.
Prayer
Praying answers prayer
--A. R. Ammons
I've no idea
what prayer is.
When I was a kid
no one ever told me,
or, more likely,
I didn't listen.
In church we recited
what was in
the prayerbook,
but what about
private prayer?
A God-size mystery.
If it's just begging,
like help-me-and-
I’ll-love-you, then
count me out.
Bargaining
with God? Sounds
doomed. And we
know how many
vows burn off
like steam
eventually.
Someone said love
was unalloyed
attention,
and that sounds
good, if partial—
but maybe love's
a way to approach
prayer somehow,
as a delicacy,
a fern-frond
alertness to wind
passing through,
the way I imagine
God might move
across this earth,
if God existed,
touching each stone
and forehead
lightly as
butterfly wings,
so you're
never sure if
you felt it
truly, or just
wanted to.
Against God
God's not dead to me, just a concept,
like honor among thieves, like neutrons,
like progress with its contradictory flags.
I can't even say I yearn to believe,
not with that boyish, tight-in-the-groin ache
that saints report—in which I believe,
at best, the way I acknowledge other
languages, other foods at distant tables.
Praying to God is like talking to a bank.
Still, I'm not denying the storms of glory.
With me there's a wisp of cloud soaking light
from the far end of a loved lake.
There are whispers in the attic, scuttlings
across the cellar floor. There's the tang
of winter breath, the spine-stiffening spasm
of love. A dog snuffling leaves brings me
good news from another territory
where I'll never live and may not ever visit.
With me it's enough, some days, that I lift
my eyes to both streetlamp and vagrant star,
that somewhere in my closet is a coat
owned by my father when he was my age,
long soaked in darkness and his smell,
a coat I can neither discard nor wear.
--originally published in Salt River Review (Winter 2005-6).
©2018 David Graham
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