prayer leaves the lips like leaves

1.
Prayer leaves the lips like leaves
fallen on the surface of that water
which moves slowest down streams.

2.
Behind quiet
we were afraid to stay.

Behind the boredom and fidgeting
of hours, the feeling of God
staring
pins one down
so that it is difficult to breath. Behind

God—the dishes pile up, a woman
on 5th street drools outside the convalescent
home, the birds on Fourth Street and Cherry
swoop down from telephone wires and poles
in flurries, electric inner city, mad with
the littered lots, the tagged walls, the shuffling
psychosis of an elder man who yells into pay phones,
the indifferent gleaming of traffic, the window shops,
and one styrofoam coffee cup atop a public mailbox.

3.
It was so hot today everyone was buying icecream
from the truck with its high pitched static melodies.

But the day will get cooler in a few hours. We can
open the windows then and let the warmth go
from inside, let slight breezes be, let the sky be
still faintly lit.

4.
Asleep later, I took my unhappiness
off like a bundle from my travel weary back
and tossed it down at the base of a silouetted tree,
his crazy arms thrown up above the black rim of earth.

We can rest our minds just like that.

5.
Some crazy men have resisted all dark
to follow the fleeing edge of light,
and it has always meant not stopping.

the real saints hung

The real saints hung
their hearts in heaven, their only cloak
on the door hook, with thin white
legs, thin hair, hung their modest
prayers mid-air.

The real saints burrowed each gospel word of theirs
in the ground, ate the locust they found. Piety
put holes it their sandles, so they washed each other's feet.
They would eat at a wooden table, dim light. In the commune gardens
burrowed their lonliness to dig up what they might.

Christians go sick with themselves (so full of freeways, so barren).
They swear the graces of God have gone still
as surfaces of lakes in morning will: our lives,
the long slow wings of a heron, so methodically
near but never breaking surface, façade, veneer.

So, we wait in lines at McDonald's,
impatient. So, we run
away from meditation, from secret.

And I can not say I see it, but do not despair
all you who suffer from a Kingdom we fail
to receive here. We are real, and still
simply become as the one real saint who hung.

Only repent. It has all already been done.