My Gospel Is

I take my orders from the whiff

of the biscuit factory, the oily smell

of the bicycle repair shop.

I have caught myself in prayer,

nose lowered, longing

for the opposite side of the river,

for those white woods I’ve heard about

where one lets go at last the body’s grip

and lifts, pale with knowledge, to hover

wingless in the windless air.

But I recover. A neighbor’s cutting

lumber, loosing the pine plank’s scent,

or a breeze is steeped in the stink

of marsh muck. My gospel is

the rolled-up rug discarded in a yard

and rained on, the fusty garden shed,

and the raised glass that stalls halfway

to the lips, the sweet milk gone bad.