Prayer to Enter Heaven Alive, Once

by Colin Pope
 
 
Or just to peer between the elevator doors
like a nervous applicant, or from an observation deck
somewhere in Tibet, to thumb a yuan into the slot,
 
spin the knob on the tower viewer and pick out
an aloof, cloud-scudded sliver, gleaming high.
I have a lot of lasts waiting for me, lord, and I need
 
to sever my jealousy from its organ, to irradiate
and shrivel it before we meet. I can’t be any part you. 
I’ll have to stop loving one day, and then
 
a last breath, which predicates a last thought. 
How long will I have between those two?
I don’t care about the meaning of life, or by which road
 
pain drives its mule-cart into me, jangling
a curio shop upon metal hooks. What will be 
the last thing I forget? I held a flashlight in a tent
 
and swept away the night, but it kept coming back.
The feel of that. If you told me the day, father,
I could stroll the pastures with an umbrella,
 
wait for the right cyclone to deposit me close. 
Or, no, sorry. Forgive the haywire powerplant I feed
with dread below the dams, and its sparks, 
 
its overflowed spillway jetting me to presume.  
I do not deserve to know the smell of the beyond,
be it oranges or burnt toast, or to wander near enough
 
to hear its inverted bustle. Perhaps only
a postcard with a view of anything—a blind rectangle 
of white light—just to keep. Perhaps
 
a rub-on tattoo in the Cracker Jack, lord, or stick figures
on a post-it above my bed, or maybe a final text:
a smiley, a thumbs-up. Not to confirm paradise
 
but that there’s a place, a way to see, manners
collected around a center. I pray there’s nothing left
to pray for up there, and no reason to come back.
 

This poem first appeared in Barrow Street