The Paying Heed

The Paying Heed

Whom do you pray to?

No one.  Absolutely nothing. 

We pray, I guess, to displace for a moment the crush of hope.

But I carried this question around with me for a while…

                                I noticed, more than noticed, the cobwebs

                                and the shoaling light, the way the doctor

                                listened, and the flecked tweed of her skirt,

                                and the speckled bird and the sickle-cell man’s

                                slim feet.  Isn’t that a kind of prayer?  The care

                                and maintenance of the web of our noticing,

                                the paying heed?

                                                                Kathleen Jamie

                                                                “Fever”

I don’t know how old I was when I concluded

that God, no matter how urgent I was,

does not intervene.  Maybe fourteen.  Maybe

that day I came back from mass and it was

late in the morning and while we were away to worship

my mother swallowed a bottle of tranquilizers—

and on a whim (some said God sent her) the neighbor

went to visit and found her just in time.  I arrived

to the hand loose on the floor, her open gargling

mouth and the coming and going of her

consciousness.  The fire was low and it was a few

days before Christmas, the hours we’d open

our generous hearts to God.  For days we were told

no we can’t go and see her, there’s no one

to drive you and my father seemed put out

when they called on the eve of Christmas Eve

to say it was finally time to come and fetch her

home.  Collect her and her belongings.  She’d be

back when we got home from our half day of school.

Bruised.  Hollowed out.  Exhausted.  Days and days

in bed and home exhausted.  Denying she tried dying

they declared her fit to be our mother and sent

her home again.  But she couldn’t.  Either one: stop

dying or be our mother.  Maybe through

habit she got back enough muscle to wash the clothes,

to make a loaf of bread, to drink, but that was

it, and we kids took it the way we were told

and God had no part of it.  I was ok with that

I guess, if it was that he could sit at her bed-rail

and hold her hand and trace the IV lines

through the poles and bags, make out which one

was the catheter and which one was the food.  I’d do

to be without, and it was truer than I’d know

for years.  Without.  I know why the need is there,

of course.  Wouldn't I sit faithfully in mass for the next

six years?  And wouldn't my mother would sit home, stoned

or broken boned, all of it routine and rote?  No one

intervened.  No one chose one course over the other

for us.  We limped along and made it

or we didn’t because what blindness we coped with

we felt we could grasp.  It was the examination

light, that brought me to my sense, too bright even 

for a suicide, though it dims when it goes out, like 

the way, after a long exposure, after closing my eyes, the negative

space remains and it floats, like angels

are supposed to do, but not being substance can’t

stop a goddamn thing, can only swish and whisper

though maybe that’s just the wind, and soon, some say, rain.