Please don’t give me, Lord, the thing I covet:
silence silken as a candleflame,
or blank and pregnant as the moon
on which I might imagine any face
or none. Resist my wish
for cool white walls, windows flung open,
the afternoon hush edged with birdsong.
Give me again and again
this rattle of wind-spun trashcans,
the schoolbus with its screechy brakes,
two dogs poised at the sill to listen
and bay back their urgent wisdom.
Teach me to see unmade beds,
fruit torn into and abandoned,
pith and rind, as hungers
satisfied, to look in cracks
for what I step, unseeing, over:
rice grains, spilled beads, a lost needle, a burr,
and dust balls spun of nothing but nostalgia
of shed skin for a body, any body.