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The Journey with Jesus: Poems and Prayers

Selected by Dan Clendenin

Christian Wiman (b. 1966)

We Lived

We lived in the long intolerable called God.
We seemed happy.

I don’t mean content I mean heroin happy,
donkey dentures,

I mean drycleaned deacons expunging suffering
from Calcutta with the cut of their jaws

I mean the always alto and surely anusless angels
divvying up the deviled eggs and jello salad in the after-rapture

I mean
to be mean.

Dear Lord forgive the love I have
for you and your fervent servants.

I have so long sojourned Lord
among the mild ironies and tolerable gods

that what comes first to mind
when I’m of a mind to witness

is muric acid
eating through the veins

of one whose pains were so great
she wanted only out, Lord, out.

She too worshipped you.
She too popped her little pill of soul.

Lord if I implore you please just please leave me alone
is that a prayer that’s every instant answered?

I remember one Wednesday witness told of a time
his smack-freaked friends lashed him

to the back of a Brahman bull that bucked and shook
until like great bleeding wings the man’s collarbones

exploded out of his skin.
Long pause.

“It was then,” the man said, “right then...”
Yes.  And how long before that man-

turned-deacon-turned-scourge-of-sin
began his ruinous and (one would guess) Holy Spirit–less affair?

At what point did this poem abandon
even the pretense of prayer?

Imagine a man alive in the long intolerable time
made of nothing but rut and rot,

a wormward gaze
even to his days’ sudden heavens.

There is the suffering existence answers:
it carves from cheeks and choices the faces

we in fact are;
and there is the suffering of primal silence,

which seeps and drifts like a long fog
that when it lifts

leaves nothing
but the same poor sod.

Dear God—

From Once in the West: Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014)..

 
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