JONATHAN FINK
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                 What Lies Ahead
                 

And then I am the boy again who’s rowed
a metal boat to center of a pond,
his father and his brother gone, released 

into the reeds to find a stream, their rods,
like riding whips, raised high above their heads.
He has not brought a pole. Instead, he casts 

the stones that fill his pockets, one by one,
into the water’s murk. Some plunge below,
while others skim the surface of the pond  

like toes of bathers testing a descent.
I would not tell him, even if I could,
what lies ahead: the long expanse of dreams, 

then waking in the dark, his body spent.
That he is tethered and adrift at once
is all he knows of what will claim his will.

 

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Prayer
                 

How even as a boy I would not pray—
I’d stare between a stranger’s shoulder blades 

and tense the muscles of my jaw until
it formed a vice no words escaped. The voice 

a congregation made unhinged in me
a silence I had never known. It turned 

inside my chest the way I thought a child
would turn. My body offered no release, 

and when my ribs would spread, each fissure gave,
unheard, a cry no less or more my own.

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