Ex Voto
Why should I feel anything like thanks
for waking up day after day to a day in its place.
Never wriggling veering or precipitous.
Never even floating just a little
and slightly to the left.
Why should I be grateful for my whacked-out personal temperatures,
the creamy silt of that black word gravity,
the secret grief of machinery, the hectic particles
and insubstantial stone that all of us are.
And the green clarity of limes. And our speck of a planet. And
carcass.
And this endlessly stupid country.
Why should I perform prostrations
for mellow ciabbata and personable naan, candles and fabulous laughter,
generosities so unexpected
they blow me to furious bits, they claw me down and down
to the most mute reply
of a chronically super-stunned heart. Why gratitude for friends
and friends and everyone, that “deeply arranged” sensation
of fondness over years. Who wants to go sighing
for a homicidal God, for death and health, the mere experience of water
like it used to pour from the eastern Sierra, and for cancer, for hands, for mouths, for eyes.
For my own glowing bones
in that hospital tower in Spring,
overlooking
the train station and the waterworks.
And the beautiful man in my house. And the sweetness of sunlight
when it comes. The preposterous miracle of being. Cancer. A life
spent trying not to fly
too fast to the end of every moment.
Nichols © 2003
Draft posted for temporary viewing.