Benediction

BENEDICTION / Stuart Dybek The fly is giving another sermon; we bow to mud receiving absolution from a worm. Impatient with prayer, we scour alleys for old slogans, memorize proverbs and epitaphs blasting from cars like electric fire branding air, or set like onyx in flashing marquees. My clothesline whip drove wind and stars, pigeons instead of ponies pulled my cart. At dusk, we traced the peddler's sing-song dirge to the misted mouth of a viaduct that swallowed full moons and the red comets of streaking tail-lights. The horizon was on the other side. Overhead, a border of boxcars thundered past in both directions. We turned back to dream in neon. Night was that narrow— a strip of darkness between shopsigns. Snow fell from the height of a streetlamp. I knew the names of seven attending angels, but was seventeen before I saw my first jay. Yet I worshipped the natural world like an immigrant in an adopted country— the one he should have been born in. For me, the complexity of a grasshopper catapulting from the Congo behind a billboard was an irrefutable proof 288 · The Missouri Review for God and his baffling order. And in my heart I stUl kneel on the boulevards in summer, seeking benediction beneath the glittering cross of a dragonfly. Stuart Dybek The Missouri Review · 289 ...