At the End of My Rope
I said the prayer the way you pay a debt,
late, half asleep, and guilty to be there,
"Lord, have mercy" on the man who finds You
only when there's no day left to spare.
My head on the pillow faded,
with each prayerful breath the bedroom became no more,
the syllables themselves now braided,
and I was hanging, grasping at the end.
Then the floor was gone.
One rope, two fists, and under me
not fire, not a pit they'd given a name,
but the un-made thing, the blank
God passed when He said let there be.
I climbed. Of course I climbed. The arms
know nothing but to grip and strain and rise,
and the harder that I hauled, the less I moved,
a thumb's width for the fury in my eyes.
Then I went still.
And rose anyway.
The cord was lifting on its own,
hauling up the fool who thought he hauled it.
My palms began to ache along the line,
I braced to find them blistered, scorched, and flayed,
but the rawness was no burn. It was a rind.
Beneath the peel, the man that He was making.
It hurt. I won't pretend it stopped.
But the burn went sweet,
the way a hand gone numb screams when the blood comes back,
and you are glad, because numb was worse.
I looked below for slack,
for the tail of it swinging in the dark,
proof of the distance won.
But there was no tail.
No hanging end.
It entered me.
At the navel.
No rope at all.
An umbilical cord.
A grown man, and the thing was in my gut,
a fetus who had walked around for years.
I should have recoiled. A cord. Inside a man.
But the horror thinned, and what was left was hush.
I could not see the far end in the dark,
but knew it like a room where I was born,
it ran up to the Mother, through her, Life,
and I stopped fighting what was making me a son.
So I let go. My grip had been for show.
The cord did not need holding. It held me,
the whole of heaven routed through her hands
and poured into one man, on a narrow bed.
And in the chamber of the heart
the whole sea entered as a single wave,
breaking with every turn of the prayer,
I was one drop of it,
not swallowed, but carrying the deep that holds the stars,
until I saw
I'd never been abandoned,
only unborn.
