Here I Am

Troilus’ love was on the tip of my tongue,
Mixed with the beer and cigarette.
The smoke, you said, was chemically.
“Then I come in and break the spell.”
but you cannot help the smell.

Riding home, ice and snow smacking off
the windshield.
The teenage age,
Our parents, fuming statuettes.
The hours we’d spent in our bedrooms,
not speaking, writing and etching the scribbled portraits
we’d slammed in our desk drawers.
But with recollection of that teenage feeling,
in crept the mood.

I remember the first book I read purposefully:
The Celestine Prophecy.
I read it in the light of my parent’s back porch,
the cicadas singing a song I later learned,
was a lust song.
But anyhow, I read that book,
And the space between my fingertips,
I explained to her,
was a millimeter of the stuff that they should have
told us about Jesus in the after-school courses.
And the mystery between myself and the sky opened up.
The microscope was turned, tuned, and raised up.
Here I Am. Here I Am!