Pastor, pray us out, she said at meeting’s end. I thought:
What sort of prayer’s an outing prayer?
Or, more likely, what is not?
Where’s my mental Book of Common Prayer—
Augustine, no; Bernard, no…
Francis, Julian, Teresa, Calvin … anyone? Anything there?
The silence grew expectant, ominously tingling, bore
down on me like a car approaching in a driving rain
on the wrong side of the road. Or
Is it me who’s veered out of lane,
out of place, out of mind? Here’s
the rub: I’m out of time. I tried in vain
to speak or scream or just to steer
out of the way, but deer-in-the-headlights, the mind stayed
frozen, planted in the liturgic mire …
[C’mon Hook said the voice in my head you can do this done it a thousand times just airmail a
sonorous o lord toward the flickering fluorescents then gin up a frothy attribution to the gilded
bovine in our collective subconscious mumble up a weasel-worded petition or two then lay on a
rafter-rattling doxology complete with Jesus-name flourish and wait for the amen.]
… never coming near what he wanted to say, as the old song says.
The car was still coming. Fast. If the prayer
wasn’t the problem, it was the prayed-to, I guess.
What is Everywhere is no where.
What is Everyone is no one.
Are we talking to ourselves here?
Kyrie eleison I intoned to No-One,
swerving just in time, and was gone.
