Slowly in Prayer by Matthew Lippman

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend July 11, 2014   Slowly in Prayer   Matthew Lippman

To be thankful for the Starbucks lady, Lucy, who is pissed at me for asking too many questions about my damn phone app is one thing. To be thankful for my wife plastering my face to the bathroom floor with pancake batter for missing the bus is another thing. I tried to be thankful for my eyes this morning even though one of them is filled with puss and the other with marigold juice. Marigold juice is the stuff that comes from the flower when you put it between your palms and rub, slowly in prayer, even though nothing comes out. It’s the imagined juice of God, the thing you can’t see when you are not being thankful. I try to be thankful for the lack of energy that is my laziness and my lonely best friend with no wife and children knowing I am as lonely as he with one wife and two daughters. Sometimes we travel five minutes to the pier in Red Hook and it takes hours in our loneliness to know, in our thankfulness, that if we held hands it’d be a quiet romance for the ages. I’ll admit, I’m thankful for Justin Timberlake because he’s better than Beethoven and my friend Aaron who lived in the woods with an axe and never used it once. I try hard to forget love, to abandon love, so that one day I will actually be able to love. Until then, I am thankful that Lucy wanted to spit in my coffee, or imagined that she did, and thanked her profusely for showing me which buttons to push and how to do it, with just the right amount of pressure, the whole tips of all my fingers dancing like stars through the blackness of a mocha latte, black.            Copyright @ 2014 by Matthew Lippman. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “‘Slowly in Prayer’ was written one Sunday morning at Starbucks. The woman who took my order was angry, not at me, but at something, and it was all over her face and in her tone of voice. When I sat down I tried to write myself out of my own anger and into a more beautiful, generous, and, dare I say, sweeter place, so I could move on with my morning.” —Matthew Lippman   Matthew Lippman is the author of American Chew (Burnside Review Books, 2013).  He teaches at Beaver Country Day School and lives in Roslindale, Massachusetts. Most Recent Book by Lippman   American Chew (Burnside Review Books, 2013 “Permanence” by Denise Duhamel “Dawn” by James Laughlin “Epistle: Leaving” by Kerrin McCadden Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038