Patrick Donnelly

Prayer over a Box of Books

Books in a box marked FREE
on a Brooklyn stoop; last chance for them
to suggest their narrative about a dancer
who came to New York City by September 14, 1982,
as a receipt shows, inside the cover
of La Danse Artistique aux Etats-Unis.

It seems he found here The Culture of Desire,
fell in love with The Front Runner and The Persian Boy,
drank The Last of the Wine,
and got sober with the Big Book, or tried.

But does the hardcover How We Die
come before or after The Suicidal Patient?
Did he find what he searched for
in Tales of the Hasidim or The Last of the Just?
At what moment was Paradise lost for good and for all?

And had it belonged to the one behind the drawn blind
who put the box this morning at the foot of the stoop,
the copy of Caregiving in a Time of AIDS,
or was it my dancer's, upon whom be peace,
and had he also known what it was like
to put out a box like this?

This is how we live now:
the light going out
in one pair of eyes after another.

Prayer at the Gym

Only an All-Powerful Name
invoked again and again
gives me victory
over middle age, a chronic virus,
the disinclination to lift these weights,
and the crevice between my eyes
reflected to me from mirrors that are everywhere
mocking the idea that my body can be beautiful in this life.

But I'm shocked to discover,
looking up from my hundredth whispered Bismillah,
I'm not the only one praying here:
the brute on the fly machine
with the black bandanna over his shaved skull--
R.I.P. WOLFMAN SHORTY inked by hand
on his right biceps, Twin Towers on the left,
his sexy little belly, if I read right, that says
he's caught the kitty too (from shooting up,
my guess, and not like me, from men)--
as he inserts the weight pin at 150
murmurs "Just one more,"
crosses himself, kisses
something he holds in his right hand,
then touches the weights in front of his heart
with a tremendous spasm of will--

    Oh God
help us to lift it
and go on lifting it,
the heavy burden of Your light.

---

Patrick Donnelly's first book of poems is The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003). He is an Associate Editor at Four Way Books. contents | previous