I was suddenly ill as the rattling bus

curved around the mountains’

repeating elbows

toward the distant summit’s tourist village,

last breath before three hours of ancient stairs

crumbling up to green ruins.

To steady myself,

I muttered the memorized fragments

of old poems.  We look at the world once.

Taciturn, oblivious.  I repeated them

for forty minutes or so, until the spell

expired, and the glass ball of pain

in the bloated cradle of my stomach

shook the poems’ grip on my clenched attention

and the passing rusts, grassy wavering of

pastures, cliffside, andenes, running streams

loosened, broke open, refracted

into something unexpected—

the rosary prayer I had finally memorized

in childhood, bead by bead, to protect

my hands from the volunteer mom

CCD teacher who paced stork-like

at the head of the classroom, surveying

the grid of melamine desks the color

of a flock of manila folders,

my legs already quivering

though I was just becoming awake

to my internal situation.  She possessed

the expected vengefulness, slapping

with her neon-pink plastic ruler

the clumsy, unremembering knuckles

of my left hand (because she had seen

such a punishment

on TV?), the pale summits and valleys

of my hand deepening red and white

as the beads I should’ve known by then

how to pray by.

I had no such beads

on the bus, but the mossy geography

of the words of the prayer

like stepping stones surfaced

from the flooded landscape

of my brain where the murk

and water that covers

everything receded to issue,

after decades, in front of me

a path:  Hello,

how art thou!  who art in Heaven!, hallow

be thy, thy will be, on Earth, give us, and

then the classroom around the prayer

which had formed the prayer to begin with

formed itself again where the undefined

and twiggy gay boy I had been

tried with crayons to create

the illusion of his favorite color “tie-dye”

in the pages of a mass-produced coloring book

filled with handsome depictions of Jesus,

and soon-to-be tie-dyed doves

and tie-dyed execution crosses,

clenching his legs in a kind of prayer

in the absence of poems,

until, like a tragic sideways benediction

of food poisoning and bad timing

he, I, shit my pants, right there in the church classroom

as the faces of the surrounding kids changed,

as the teacher-mom oversaw

my legs squirming with the question

I would’ve asked

if not for burying it in my larynx instead

or, rather, burying

only its beginning, Miss,

can I go—my hand not shooting up,

knowing what I needed but still not

saying so.  Then I remembered

I was on a bus, weaving through mountains

and the vision, if we can call it that,

finally compelled me to turn

to my friend who sat beside me, quite oblivious,

reading Nabokov how I imagine everyone

reads Nabokov by watching clouds

drift in the nearest window instead,

the book open in her lap.

I said, Please.

Which plainly meant, I am dying.

I was not dying, of course,

merely preferring death,

my body the object again, the soul

in this case

a thin thread in a whirlwind

having no business being where it was

though having no volition either,

so I relinquished

and said thank you for the prayer,

thank you for the classroom, the teacher-mom

and her pacing,

thank you for the poems that were the trouble,

the broken ringlets, the unbroken

surface of the pond of the poems

that bought me the forty minutes or so

through which the light of time

shattered and burst across the bus

forming the classroom of the Parish of

Elizabeth Ann Seton in Absecon,

New Jersey, reforming as the passing

of language to my dear friend

to the fluent couple in the front row

who convinced the driver to pull over

into one of the villages along the tourist road

where a shopkeeper, thank you, permitted

my Please, please, please, please,

my flinging open the door at the rear

for my sheepish body, which is living.