About Suffering

I heard on the radio this morning that patients who are prayed for suffer less than those who receive no prayers. Studies have been performed with extreme care. The prayerless patients were kept in an isolated hospital wing—without windows, visitors, phone messages, letters, flowers, silk pajamas or any other form of prayer listed in the latest edition of A Field Guide to Prayers.

Even fragrances are considered a form of prayer, especially the scent of flowers or baking bread, or of lemons and oranges, which remind one of the many flavors of the divine. The walls of the hospital rooms for the prayerless are scoured with Clorox which carries the pale blue astringent scent of amnesia and loss.

Agnosticism smells of bergamot, dust and wheat, one note lighter than cedar or sandalwood, said to be the fragrance of belief and to waft eternally from holy relics.

Even the sheets and pillowcases of the prayerless were changed daily, for the smell of one’s own sweat and dreams can inspire memories and images of longing. 

Longing is the essential ingredient of every prayer.

My Life from Underwater or Why I Write Poetry

All my life I’ve felt as if I were drowning. As if something were holding me down, pulling me under the waves. I once hoped it would change—that I’d grow out of it and learn to breathe easily. That I wouldn’t feel as if I were walking in those heavy shoes mothers once made their daughters wear to keep their arches from falling, to prevent them from lifting up and up like a kite or being swept away in a gust of wind. As a teenager, I blamed my father who said girls should be seen and not heard, lovely but not mouthy; later it was boyfriends, lovers, even one-night stands. Love, even fleeting love, left me with the taste of brine in my tongue, my body aching from being tossed by the surf and ground into the sand. As I grew old, I learned to breathe underwater, to flap my gills quietly so no one could hear the songs of bubbles escaping beneath my blouse—the soggy one-two rhythm of despair. Gradually I fell in love with the sea.  That dizzy, half-asphyxiated song of the blues. I took up talking to the waves, shaping each word with my lips just so, releasing them like schools of minnows no one else would hear or see. Like smoking, it’s soothing to exhale. To watch the flicker of a thousand tails catching the sunlight as they leave.