Sleep trouble

It's hot, and we don't have AC, and of course that's not good for sleep, which has made me think of another poem about sleeplessness, again in the form of prayer--written in winter but still valid.

Praying Sleepless

after Hudgins and Wilbur

O Lord, that last, late-evening cappuccino—
beautiful fuel of poets’ conversations,
inspirer of wild readings and sweeping gestures,
intense, froth-headed, somewhat over-the-top—
that was poor judgment. Here I am again,
bug-eyed at midnight. Brain a wheeling hamster.
Groping the darkness for some ropey ladder
down to oblivion. Hauling You along.

You must know, Lord, You’re awkward company.
Like that great-aunt, chintz-clad and over-scented,
who pursed her lips around the family secrets
and mumbled her long love in a gravelly accent
that baffled a small child. And I’m still baffled,
starting out with You. The formal approach?
The etiquette says, Start with adoration,

and right away I’m lost. What does adoring
feel like? Like fingers itching for a cell phone?
Eyes gorging big-screen candy, or gowns on the runway,
or the hyped whoever hurtling down a field?
Like awe, in the face of massiveness beyond me—
the Large Hadron Collider, the Horsehead Nebula,
the federal budget? Surely not. Start over.

I know; I’d do this better on my knees.
My body would instruct my gunning brain
in depth, concerning its wet-noodle weakness.
Forgive me, Lord. Kneeling would put off sleep
further. The bed’s warm. Thank You for that,
and for the notion to take things out of order
and do thanksgiving first: For the loved body
next to me, and the wheezing of his CPAP,
and the little Martian-green light of the monitor
that stands as guardian angel over his heart,

though I haven’t prayed in years to a guardian angel.
Lately they seem to be falling down on the job,
always shouted down by the sound of money,
or drugs, or fear of other people. Lord,
what happened to my childhood certainties?
Was it mere recitation, when I knelt
on a little prie-dieu, in a grade-school hallway,
before the Infant of Prague, robed like an emperor
in satins matched to the liturgical season?

Or when I stood to intone the Memorare
crowned with silk flowers, in a blue lace semiformal
in church, before the May-procession crowd?
How do I deal with those period-piece locutions
stuffed with strained imagery and inverted grammar?
“To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve.”
“Despise not my petitions.” Even in private
the words sound wrenched, like a bad beginner’s poem.

Where does that leave me, Lord, trying to pray?
Yes, there’s the Gospel-certified Our Father—
but here be dragons, if you knew my father. . . .

so praying crumbles away to the endless question,
Who are You, Lord? What do you want of me?
I hope You hear me, mumbling inside my skull.
You who are somewhere past the edge of spacetime,
somewhere within the null of the neutrino,
lure me off the cliff of my comprehension
the way Road Runner lures Wile E. Coyote,
so that I hang, know I am lost, and fall

and fall, into the surf of repetition,
hail Mary, holy Mary, hidden behind
the wave machine of mantra, aiming at You
but slantwise, down the curl. Just the one prayer,
beadless, uncounted. Now that I have seen
the hour of our death, the hours of four grim deaths,
the ashen hours and days of an almost-death—
I fumble there. I start again, hail Mary,
trusting the earth’s divine maternal forces
to draw the weighted dark over my head.

(First published in Evangelization and Culture; in the book The O in the Air)