A Man of Unclean Lips Considers Prayer

for Nicole

The angel was kind, a school nurse
applying the live coal like a bandage. Antiseptic

white, wings rolled to his elbows,
his hands were like my own, which should have seemed

more strange. His voice was feather-soft,
familiar. I guess I expected to go under –

wasn’t surgery required?
The infection went so deep

I was certain it would take a blade.
Nothing.

Just a touch of heat.
No scalded stub of cigarette on flesh

or punishment of metal on the skin.
Just a touch of heat,

as if he’d rubbed his palms together fast and light,
then laid them on my wound.

Prayer is simply this:
I have nothing to explain.

Rock & Sling, A Journal of Witness just published this poem in its most recent issue (11.2), and I am happy to share it with you as the final love poem of February. I wrote it for a friend, a nurse who loves this story. It’s a picture of love that comes out of Isaiah 6, where the prophet receives his calling from God. Isaiah’s unworthiness seems to come crashing down on him in one mighty wave, when an angel appears at the ready to touch his lips with burning coal as a symbol of forgiveness. The image can look cruel, a scalding punishment required to make amends, but I don’t see it that way. I see healing. I see the kindness of a wound cauterized to prevent infection. And I see grace. As Isaiah prays, I watch him labor under the burden of some elaborate confession or explanation of his failings. I don’t read his silencing as a stifling, but as mercy. It’s not that there is nothing to forgive, but he doesn’t need to offer an eloquent defense. He simply needs to receive what he need not, can not, earn. This is the best love I can imagine, a love that doesn’t rely on my ability to talk my way into it. I hope to offer it to others, and I long for it myself. For all of us, may we feel, from time to time, freedom from the need to measure up. May we truly fall in love, certain of the arms that catch us.

Let that be my parting note for a little while. I’m going to take the month of March off from weekly postings. I’ve been at this for about ten months, and it’s time to rest and to finish the final step in the project that started this whole affair. I’ll be ordering and mailing out the hardcover copies of The Other Stars Hover & Wait during March, and I want to do that well. I’ll see you in April, and we’ll figure out what’s next.