Mid-life Prayer

When will fear, stretched like a film, no longer wrap the world in a haze so that my eyes cannot discern its true forms, making earth’s boundaries uncertain, approximate, impenetrable, rendering me contorted, paralyzed, cowering as a mouse in the darkness, heart fluttering, bones fragile? My mind, a slippery seal, a fogged windshield. I want to breathe like a stone. Instead, I am a vine twisting upon itself seeking, desperately, a branch upon which to cling. My organs contract, hold their breath, my eyes refuse to focus, like a pitch that will not tune. My edges ambiguous, undefined. A wet, silvery fish, gasping, flailing. When will the opaque fog of fear drift or disintegrate, its shroud slip off my shoulders like a nightgown before love making? My feet yearn for soil. I search for my center, pray for the solidity of my bones. My brain, a psychiatric ward—my thoughts a rubber ball, bouncing endlessly from corner to corner jailed by electric white walls. My spirit a hollow-boned bird, trembling, restless to take flight, ascending, aiming for that crack in the clouds where the God-Sun peaks through in its radiance to comfort us.