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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