April 29, 2011: Prayer, Marie Howe
Prayer
Marie Howe
Someone or something is leaning close to me now
trying to tell me the one true story of my life:
one note,
low as a bass drum, beaten over and over:
It’s beginning summer,
and the man I love has forgotten my smell
the cries I made when he touched me, and my laughter
when he picked me up
and carried me, still laughing, and laid me down,
among the scattered daffodils on the dining room table.
And Jane is dead,
and I want to go where she went,
where my brother went,
and whoever it is that whispered to me
when I was a child in my father’s bed is come back now:
and I can’t stop hearing:
This is the way it is,
the way it always was and will be—
beaten over and over—panicking on street corners,
or crouched in the back of taxicabs,
afraid I’ll cry out in jammed traffic, and no one will know me or
know where to bring me.
There is, I almost remember,
another story:
It runs alongside this one like a brook beside a train.
The sparrows know it; the grass rises with it.
The wind moves through the highest tree branches without
seeming to hurt them.
Tell me.
Who was I when I used to call your name?
==
Also by Marie Howe:
What the Living Do
Part of Eve’s Discussion
Death, The Last Visit
On this day in…
2010: The Talker, Chelsea Rathburn
2009: There Are Many Theories About What Happened, John Gallagher
2008: bon bon il est un pays, Samuel Beckett
2007: Root root root for the home team, Bob Hicok
2006: Fever 103°, Sylvia Plath
2005: King Lear Considers What He’s Wrought, Melissa Kirsch
