CHILLS

God is feeling cold today

Shivering, He pulls on a wool hat

And wraps the universe around Him

Relays of angels bring Him

Great bowls, filled to the brim

With the Platonic Idea of Soup.  

All meetings have been cancelled;

Prayers, anxiously pacing around

The infinite waiting-room

Have started answering each other.

MOUSEBONE

She sees in the dark so Baba Yaga
Carries her mouse-bone lantern solely
In order for others to see her.
The storm, rapidly approaching,
Has left her the only god
Walking along the beach tonight.
If you must pray, be careful.

KNOW

Since she doesn't exist
The angel Ayin
Cannot answer prayers.
She listens, though,
To all who want
No one to hear.

PRAYERS

For the first time in years St. Jerome
Hauled out his inks and quills
And hand-lettered some pages;
His lion posted them on streetlights.
They advised the world that the saint
Would no longer answer prayers
Would not, in fact, even listen
To anything sounding like a prayer.
Some, though, live in great fear
That their prayers might be answered;
When Jerome next woke, on his grating
On the shadowed side of Seventh Avenue,
He was under a passion of prayers
Who'd crawled near him in the night,
Trusting he would ignore them.

TOMAS MASARYK ON THE MIDWAY

Back when I was at the University

The Tomas Masaryk monument

Stood in a field by itself.
Though not a rider, Masaryk

Sat stiffly on a bored bronze horse.
Some nights, dismounting,

He’d walk down the Midway
To check in with the statues
Crowding Rockefeller Chapel.
He might chat with Zoroaster
Or listen to Athanasius tell jokes
Of surprising puerility.

As he passed her, St. Cecilia
Often hummed the opening bars
Of Jezu Kriste Scedre Kneze
Which he used to sing in Prague

When he was a boy and not an image.
There is a statue of a girl, a student,
Named Margaret Green. She stands
Next to the west nave entrance.
She gave him one night a prayer
I’d left carelessly behind
(The ambulatory was quiet. I went there

To think about ghosts but fell asleep.).
Passing my dorm on his way back
Masaryk left the prayer in my mailbox.
(No, I didn't see him leave it
But how else did it get there?)

A NEW SAINT, LOOKING FOR PRAYERS

I meant to type the phrase "at need"
But my machine, in its mechanical despair,
Conjured up St. Nerd. As a new saint,
And a rather clumsy one at that,
He solicits your prayers. Send him some;
We will sift through them. Who knows
What sort of miracles he may have
Up the sleeve of his misbuttoned shirt?