I'm going to read four more poems,
cheating slightly because one of them is sort of a double poem.
It's the title poem called Oblique Prayer.
The book itself is called Oblique Prayers.
It's plural.
And this is a Oblique Prayer, singular.
And it has a kind of pendant called the antiphon.
Oblique prayer.
Not the profound dark night of the soul and not the austere
desert to scorch the heart at noon,
grip the mind in teeth of ice at evening.
But gray, a place without clear outlines.
The air heavy and thick.
The soft ground clogging my feet if I walk, sucking
them downwards if I stand.
Have you been here?
Is it a part of humanness to enter no man's land?
I can remember.
Is it asking you that makes me remember?
Even here, the blessed light that
caressed the world before I stumbled into this place
of mere not- darkness.