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Orb, Floating in the Almond Groves

By Ken Meisel

Off Highway 5, in the San Joaquin Valley, I spotted a gold finch, his yellow shoulders prideful, glorious, like poured stars, & he was singing in the almond groves. Let me whisper a secret to you: I heard the bird before I saw it. I’d been kneeling in the orchards, trying to pray. & that is because prayer is the way we try to complete something. & I was finished with something lonesome in me, but they never tell you that in church. They tell you that prayer opens possibility – which might be true – but prayer is actually asking death to move a life aside                                     & when I was praying like this I’d never been to California much less the San Joaquin Valley                                     & the sadness of it all made me believe some people are born by contradictory value & others, by veneration, & I wanted that. I wanted the veneration.                                     & I mattered so little to what my name told me about me & so I started to pray, just at the edge of some revolt.                                     & the way the almond blossoms fell to the ground, so soft & silent                      like angel fingerprints trying, one at a time, to kiss the sore spots of the earth,                                     captured me, moved me inward. & that they could smell of honey, against the dry ground & love a limitlessness in them anyway . . . & do a duty in order to love                      a perfection in them even as they dropped without the slightest prompting, made the softest turning of faith rise me.

                               & something let go then, in me. & I could see, without a shape, someone shrouded & veiled                                in the distant white canopy where the white petals were falling like a Universe being born & I couldn’t fully see her there – a light most glad of all – but she was there, waiting in that way we anticipate a dream to launch again – to revive its cinematic pictures for us.                                     & incarnation is so unintelligible at first, it’s so un–invented,

                                    & the mind can’t find it . . . & it’s never our two eyes that are first to see, but it’s just the wound in us – so long & so patient in the waiting –

                                    &

the one who gains the wound to love can only find it                      through veneration – I swear that’s true –                                     & through someone else                      who opens likewise . . .

                                    & so . . . I could sense her there, like a flickering orb, opening like a star in the Universe                  & so I waited, in an inexpressible anticipation, like I was a branch of extended almond blossoms that had been told they’d shiver                  & fall till I was emptied,                  & then I’d be ready to be seized by something                  miraculous. & the unctuous little rat there, hunched & twitching & grinning at me by a hot spot under the moon, waited . . .          it waited for me – oh I swear it did – till I was done praying.                  & it kept me whole & attentive, till that orb came. & I saw

Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist, a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of eight books of poetry. His most recent books are: Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020) and Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press: 2018). His new book, Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance, was published in 2022 by Kelsay Books. Meisel has recent work in Concho River Review, I-70 Review, San Pedro River Review, Crab Creek Review and Rabid Oak.

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