Prayer in the throat of a non-believer
offered up to the absent hereafter,
his two long notes and descending warble
put him at the centre of things.
A partial method, he knows, is no method;
but when you are too weak for beauty’s
startlement, when you desire not silence
but the peace of vague and benign
neglect, at decibels audible over
the wind, radio, tyres through gravel,
through the open driver’s window
his song is like arrows of pure math
straight into whatever the heart is,
its still unbroken land, its native grasses.
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