A reading from my Psalm 42:

As the deer stumbles in from the wildfire,
with black smoke stitched into her hide,
and she lowers her mouth to the river
lying the dying to another morning —

that’s me looking for You.

Though I cannot say You,
at least not without immediately surrounding the word with scaffolding:
God. Absence. Origin.
The dark before the first star.
The great ear pressed against the wall of the world.
The name we give the night when we are begging for it to hold us.

I do not know what to call You.
I only know that something paces the drought-line of my body at night,
lifting its head whenever the pipes knock in the walls.

Something remembers water it has never touched.

That’s what I thirst for:
The water before the well.
The flame before anyone claimed to own the light.
The face that first turned toward loneliness
before loneliness had learned to cry out.

I want the God who still has river-water in His beard,
and burrs stuck in the hem of Her dress.
Minnow-flash on the cuffs.
Pine smoke in the hair.
A damp sleeve from the monsoons They endured to get here. 
The God who, if I ever found’m,
would be less like finding the correct word at the end of a sentence
and more like waking with my cheek against the chest
of someone I thought I had lost.

When can I come before that Light?
When can I stop kneeling before the locked door of heaven
with my ear against the wood?

When will the silence on the other side
either speak or admit that no one is home?

I’ve been eating my tears as food.
I’ve swallowed the ocean one teaspoon at a time.
I’ve salted every meal with absence.
I’ve stood barefoot in the refrigerator light
holding a carton of milk gone bad,
while the house rises and falls around me
with the enormous sleeping lungs of everyone I love
and cannot keep.

No one asks "Where is God?” with their mouth anymore.

The oncologist asks by pointing at a white bloom on a black scan.
The widow asks by sleeping on the edge of a continent that used to be a bed.
The roadside memorial in New Brighton asks
with one blue shoe still curved around the ghost of a child’s foot.
The funeral flowers ask by opening wider
because nobody told them what kind of hell just happened.

And I keep asking it too: Where are You?
You whom I’ve never met but have always known?

I don’t know.
But I do remember.

I remember walking with the crowd toward the house of God,
back when the word God had windows in it,
and every one of them was open.

The sanctuary smelled of wet wool and burnt coffee
and we sang like death had been misinformed.

In the pew ahead of me someone’s baby
was chewing off the corner of a hymnal.
In the pew behind me, an old man sang every note slightly late
as if eternity had begun without him and he was doing his best to catch up.

I remember it all,
and so why, my soul,
are you hiding beneath the table with your knees pulled to your chest?
Tell me what terrible thing can you hear that the rest of us cannot?

Come out.
Not because the world has been acquitted. It hasn’t.
There is still blood beneath its fingernails.
And not because the test came back clean,
or the war ended,
or the child called home,
or the dark finally apologized for what it did while no one was looking.

Come out because morning has once again
hauled its enormous golden animal over the hill,
panting light into every window without first checking the names
of those who deserve to wake.

I am not asking you to feel better.
I know the cruelty of demanding sunrise
from someone still being buried by night.
I am asking you to come out while the ash is still warm,
so that you can bet on the mystery anyway.

And if my soul insists on staying low,
I will not drag you toward the light.

But I will remember the Love from Itasca,
where the mighty Mississippi begins ankle deep and shy.

And the Lights on Lake Street,
where windows shattered and buildings burned
and community still came through the next morning
with plywood, coffee, and a broom.

And Tenderness of the North Shore,
where the cliffs lean over Superior as though listening for the bottom.

The deep still calls to the deep.
The unspeakable in me calls to the Unnameable in You.
Your waterfalls break open against the rock.
Your waves drag their blue hands across my ribs.

Everything You are has swept over everything I thought I was —
and somehow, beneath all that water,
I can still hear my heart beat.

And I still can see it:
How every morning Love throws a wool scarf
around the shoulders of the shivering world,
and how every night a song leaves the porch light on.

And so my prayer is simply this:

Whoever You are that keeps singing in the dark, please,
don’t stop before I remember the words.


“Psalm 42”
Acrylic on Canvas
16×20