Carnal Fragrance

Prayer

32 Prayer Of course I prayed. Partly out of habit; I prayed as a child without learning how, without knowing what haunting necessity possessed me then. So when it seemed certain my husband, my partner of my entire adult life was going to die, I prayed the hardest prayer: Thy will be done. I was giving up arguments, bargaining, recriminations. The carnal fragrance of hope. Except for an almost inaudible request for mercy, I would go on living with Thy will. Except for an almost unquenchable quest for meaning I would go on laying down one word after another with trembling, shaking, dwelling with moving lips on the relentless decay and the way we love the children of our children; what it means to leave an absence behind. What it is: to leave. But would I be able to skirt the divinity and order and moral protest of poetry? And how else to obliterate the glibness of death by cancer? I began pounding these Kabbalistic questions on Afro-Cuban drums and found I could reach pure anger by banging beyond concept. Drumming with other women and men I became a lunatic drumming my frenzy in chorus on bare nerve briefly giving up my quest for meaning. 33 Hearing how grief and heartbeat augmented each other I began to regain my personal sense of desire. I kept walking rapidly early in the morning, chanting conviction under my breath talking about him to everybody I came across not caring that they seemed uncomfortable baffled that I let him die in the house in the bed on the side where I will never sleep dosing him with almost invisible tabs of morphine forced past his lips and under his tongue to melt like hot snow the more swiftly to enter his blood stream fully understanding intervals and ultimate objective and why it is I can now bring myself to remember as many details as I can bear and I can keep walking and chanting and drumming thy will and I can call it prayer and I can keep praying and praying that someday my will comes closer to yours, O Lord. ...