Number 152: If Trouble Comes

Of course I pray that trouble does not come today.

Today, I hope, will be a bed of roses shorn of thorns and full of of other comforting cliches: Spring showers. Daffodils. Kittens playing with a ball of string.

I pray that’s all this day will bring.

— But —

if trouble comes

If trouble comes, I pray that I would meet it like a boy, sixteen and shirtless, standing on a hillside above the river, his muscles bronzed and lean.

I pray that I would meet it the way that boy clambers down to find the place beneath the soaring bridge where someone has tied a rope to the girders.

I pray that I’d grasp trouble like a rope, let it and all its stored up energy swing me out over still or rushing waters, me as indifferent to the waters’ nature as that boy suspended, framed by an arched bridge against a flat blue sky.

And when the moment comes for me to fall from trouble grasped into the abyss of troubles unknowable, I pray that I would let go with such a shout, hallooing out to the world with so much lust and joy that it might be fooled (for a second at least): believe I did not fall but rather fly.