Vespers
by Paul Hooker
This room is full of words
impatient for the joust
lances tucked firmly into arm-pits
steam-breathed stallions paw the earth
eager for the charge, the clash full tilt
that aims to unseat the metal-clad meaning
of another. Broken preachments
are strewn like autumn’s dried-up leaves
across time’s rutted lists, here where
hearts once pierced were left to bleed.
This room is full of prayers
helium balloons full of petty piety
nuncios to an alien episcopacy
decrees dispatched from haunts
of haunted yearning, jostle for a seat
in confessionals where no one slides
the latticed screen to listen. Inflated pleas
encyclicals to minor more familiar gods
rise on updrafts; they burst their bullae
and cascade like falling ashes to the floor.
This room is full of hymns
that swell and rise then crest and sink
on ocean waves, like frigates made of air
laden with the music of foreign passions
canticles mis-navigated from missals
in strange tongues, run aground in
these storm-racked nights. Broken melodies
crash on the rocks of our disenchantment;
they leave their fleckèd foam marooned
on deserted beaches of comfortable habit.
Outside this room, night is falling
and in the Darkness Something
presses its Nose against the windowpane;
insistent, It interrupts the reverie
begging only to be let in
to light and hearth and quiet respite
from the loneliness. Whining
it would share Its gentle healing Presence
tendered in Its cross-shaped sacrifice
if only It could come in from the cold.