Reaching for my Prayer Book

Beneath the feet of arithmetic are the ten integers upon which the body of all measurements stands. The All which is All. And I have waited a lifetime to meet it. This gentle containment, the chalice of morning when the sun is ten thousand centimeters behind the fog. The sky up, the gravitational pull into balance—And I’m waltzing from room to room in the music of one seismic tone, reaching for my prayer book. Glory be to the numbers that hold the harmonic chords of the firmament intact, the light spectrum drumming, the picture window beating time with the roses on our old sofa just warm enough so I lie there between Latin syllables, between the vowels of psalms, while you boil water for coffee, set the oven of loving to some safe estimation of Fahrenheit.

Perish the Thought

Perishing to the right of me, perishing to the left as I walk among the six billion . . . And there but for the grace of the Goddess doth we perish. Our pets perish, our jazziest cars, our resources of leftover steak and cheese subs in the fridge. We’ve inhabited other bodies in which we have perished from drugs and diseases, we’ve been hanged and beheaded, poisoned and stoned, disemboweled and tied to the stake, at the mercy of dictators, soldiers, spouses and Popes. The Cemetery of Perishables runs miles and miles with mausoleums overseen by stone angels, their open, chipped fingers like claws. Even the Sphinx perishes, but like Ozymandias, she does it slowly, watching the rest of us lepers, from eon to eon, rapidly rot. No one is not perishing. No republic, no island nation, no empire . . . Not even the Romans didn’t perish, eventually shredded by perishing Huns and Saxons and Goths. Even their pagan gods are breathless now. As mortal as rock stars, only they’re real stars, burnt out and ashen, thumb-tacked onto the night.