Audience

            When I think on Your nearness, I picture a lizard biting my thumb. We’re both rather private, and I’m not quick. That’s why I’m writing. I love listening for You from this distance. Truth be told, I’m comforted by Your steady silence and absence. I know You are there by how often I feel Your absence, not at all like abandonment, not wholly like loneliness, which has its share, but also like the wake that follows when I leave a friend’s potluck into cold streets crazed by ice. If You are a grammatical mood, You are homo irrealis. If You are a verb, You are a copula. You were the year I lived in a food desert. The year of the solar eclipse. The year of the abscess and overdraft fees. The year Lake Merritt reeked of death, choked by algal bloom: yellowfins, flounder, crabs, striped bass, and bat rays choked by algal bloom. The year I landed in Florence, I was the only one from my flight questioned (first in Italian, then English): Where are you from? Not African? How much money do you have on you? Where is your passport? Why are you here? In the Convent of San Marco where, once, friars tended a garden of simples and a great library of 400 books, Fra Angelico painted frescoes inside their cells, a small scene from the life of Christ beside a smaller window, and each cell I entered shook me like a good line break, a poem’s leap of faith, and in my unknowing, and in my surprise, was happiness. Fra Angelico knew what to withhold, scripture being a shared language, and painted details, not props. The door to hell kicked off its hinges, indelible, sure. But the nails. The bent nail.