Centering Prayer

by Ann Marie Wranovix

Centering Prayer
 for my father

I wasn’t there the night
my sisters held your hands,
I can’t describe the froth
that bubbled from your mouth,
or feel your choking fear,
when the lungs slammed shut,
or bear the heavy space
that pooled around your bed.

That’s a cheap trick mostly
used by rhetoricians,
apophasis: to deny
what you mean to affirm.
Also theologians,
though they practice without
words, walking an empty
way, except Aquinas,
whose more capacious frame
allows analogy
the next best thing to silence.

Sometimes I let myself stop
breathing after the exhale,
resting in the still point,
emptied out, no longer
feeling my clothes or my skin,
my pulse like tiny stitches
threading me to life, or like
a shy bird fluttering
at an unseen window.

When I found your room that night
and took your hand, your skin
smooth and still warm, you lay there

empty in the wordless air
that held and balanced us
like the silence between breaths.