I've given poetry readings where less than a handful of people were present. It's a humbling experience. It’s also a deeply familiar experience.

"Poetry is useless," poet Geoffrey ****** said in a 2013 interview, "but it is useless the way the soul is useless—it is unnecessary, but we would not be what we are without it."

I was raised a Roman Catholic, and though I don’t go to Mass regularly anymore, I still remember early mornings during Advent when I went to liturgies at my parochial school. It was part of my offering—the sacrifice I made to honor the impending birth of the Savior—along with giving up candy at Lent. So few people attended at that hour that the priest turned on only a few lights near the altar. Approaching the front of the church, my plastic book bag rustling against my winter coat, I felt as if I were nearing the seashore at sunrise: the silhouettes of old widows on their kneelers at low tide, waiting for the priest to come in, starting the ritual in plain, unsung vernacular. No organist to blast us into reverence. No procession.

Every day, all over the world, these sparsely attended ceremonies still happen. Masses are said. Poetry is read. Poems are written on screens and scraps of paper. When I retire for the day, I move into a meditative, solitary, poetic space. These are the central filaments burning through my life, and the longer I live, the more they seem to be fused together.

Poetry is marginal, thankless, untethered from fame and fortune; it's also gut level, urgent, private yet yearning for connection. In all these ways, it's like prayer for me. I’m a not-quite-lapsed Catholic with Zen leanings, but I’ll always pray—and I’ll always write poems. Writing hasn’t brought me the Poetry Jackpot I once pursued, but it draws on the same inner wiring that flickers when I pray.        

• • •

In the 2012 collection A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith, nineteen contemporary American poets, from Buddhist to Wiccan to Christian, discuss how their artistic and spiritual lives inform one another. Kazim Ali, who was raised a Shia Muslim, observes in his essay “Doubt and Seeking”:

[Prayer is] speaking to someone you know is not going to be able to speak back, so you're allowed to be the most honest that you can be. In prayer you're allowed to be as purely selfish as you like. You can ask for something completely irrational. I have written that prayer is a form of panic, because in prayer you don't really think you're going to be answered. You'll either get what you want or you won't.

You could replace the word "prayer" with "poetry" with little or no loss of meaning. I'd even go so far as to say that submitting my work to a journal often feels like this, too. Sometimes, when I get an answer in the form of an acceptance, I'm stunned.

"I never think of a possible God reading my poems, although the gods used to love the arts,” writes ***** Howe in her essay "Footsteps over Ground." She adds:

Poetry could be spoken into a well, of course, and drop like a penny into the black water. Sometimes I think that there is a heaven for poems and novels and music and dance and paintings, but they might only be hard-worked sparks off a great mill, which may add up to a whole-cloth in the infinite.

And here, you could easily replace the word "poetry" with "prayer." The penny falling to the bottom of a well is more often what we experience. But both poetry and prayer are things humans have learned to do in order to go on. Doubt is a given, but we do get to choose what it is we doubt.

A God in the House Book Cover
Quite a few authors in A God in the House (Howe, Gerald Stern, Jane Hirschfield, Christian Wiman) invoke the spiritual writing of Simone Weil, including her assertion that "absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." This sounds like the Zen concept of mindfulness. And it broadens the possibility for poetry as prayer, regardless of content, since writing poetry is an act of acute mindfulness. We mostly use words in the practical world to persuade or communicate, but prayers in various religious traditions can be lamentations of great sorrow. Help me, save me, take this pain away—I am in agony. In a church or a temple or a mosque, such prayerful lamentation is viewed as a form of expression for its own good, even when it doesn't lead immediately to a change of emotional state.

Perhaps the unmixed attention Weil wrote of is a unity of intention and utterance that’s far too rare in our own lives. We seldom match what we think or feel with what we actually say. When it happens spontaneously in poetry or prayer—Allen Ginsberg's "First thought, best thought" ideal —it feels like a miracle, as do all the moments when I manage to get out of my own way as a poet.

Many people who pray don’t envision a clear image of whom or what they’re praying to. But poets often have some sense of their potential readers. There are authorities whose approval I've tried to win or simply people I've tried to please: teachers, fellow writers, editors, contest judges—even my uncle, who actually reads my poems when they appear in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where he used to work.

And yet, my most immersed writing is not done with those real faces in mind. I write to the same general entity to which I pray. It's as if the dome of my skull extends to the ceiling of the room I'm in, then to the dome of the sky and outward. It’s like the musings I had as a child lying awake at night, when my imagination took me to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. But then I emerge from this wide-open state and begin thinking about possible readers—and the faces appear.

This might also be where the magic ends.

• • •

I write poetry because it’s what I do, just as frogs croak and mathematicians ponder numbers. Poetry draws on something in me that has persisted over time, even as I’ve distracted myself with other goals, demands, and purposes; even as I’ve been forced by circumstance to strip writing poetry of certain expectations.

"Life on a Lily Pad" © Michelle Tribe
"Life on a Lily Pad"
© Michelle Tribe
At 21, I was sure I’d publish my first book before I was 25. I’m past my forties now and have yet to find a publisher for a book-length collection, though I've published more than a hundred individual poems and two chapbooks. So, if a “real” book is the equivalent of receiving indisputable evidence that your prayers are being answered, I’m still waiting.

It hasn’t been easy to shed the bitter urgency I’ve felt on learning that one of my manuscripts was a finalist in this or that contest, but was not the winner. Writing in order to attain external success can be as tainted and brittle as saying a prayer that, in truth, is more like a command: (Please), God, let me get through this difficulty (or else)—

Or else what? It’s a false threat, if there’s little else left to do but pray. When my partner is in the ICU, his lungs full of fluid backed up from a defective aortic valve; when my nephew is deployed to Afghanistan; when an ex is drowning in his addiction; when I hit a dead end in my job and don’t think I can do it one more day—every effort to imagine that these things might be gotten through is a kind of prayer that helps me weather a life over which I have little control.

Repeated disappointment in my quest to hit the Poetry Jackpot has taught me to recast the jackpot in the lowercase—locating it not in the outcome but in the act of writing itself, sorting out the healthy from the unhealthy intentions for doing it. Of course, this shift in perspective was not as neat as the preceding sentence makes it seem. There were years of thrashing about, of turning over stones and even throwing them, then moments of exhaustion when I just barely heard the message from within:

This is too fragile and fraught to be something that guides your whole life.

I didn't hear those words, exactly—and this is important. For decades, I’ve made my living as a writer. But I can't manipulate or edit total gut realizations. I can throw words at them, but it would be like shaking a water bottle at a forest fire; at best, I can chase the feeling with metaphors: It's like this—no, like this—or like this.

So, odd as this sounds for a poet, I now seek wordlessness. When I meditate, I intercept hundreds of times the impulse to shape a perception into words. Reduced to basics, the challenge facing any writer is knowing what to say—and what not to.

• • •

To read or listen to poetry requires unmixed attention just as writing it does. And when a poem is read aloud, there's a communal, at times ritualistic, element that can make a reading feel like collective prayer, even if there are only a few listeners in the audience or I’m listening by myself.

"Allen Ginsberg" © MDCArchives
Allen Ginsberg
© MDCArchives
When I want to feel moved and enlarged, all I have to do is play Patti Smith's rendition of Ginsberg's "Footnote to Howl." His long list poem from 1955 gathers people, places, objects, and abstractions onto a single exuberant altar. It’s certainly a prayer, one that opens this way:

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and **** and hand and ******* holy!

Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!

Some parts of Ginsberg's list ("forgiveness! charity! faith! bodies! suffering! magnanimity!") belong in any conventional catalogue of what a prayer celebrates as sacred. Other profane elements ("the ***** of the grandfathers of Kansas!") gain admission because they are swept up into his ritualistic roll call.

I can easily parody Ginsberg's litany: Holy the Dairy Queen, holy the barns of the Amish where cheese is releasing its ambitious stench, holy the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Internet. But reading the poem aloud feels to me the way putting on ritual garments must to a shaman or rabbi or priest. Watching Patti Smith perform the poem (various versions are available on YouTube), I get shivers seeing how it transforms her, and it's clear why she titled her treatment of the poem "Spell."

A parody can't do that. It can't manifest as the palpable unity of intention and utterance. It can't do what Emily Dickinson famously said that poetry did to her:

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only [ways] I know it. Is there any other way.

Like the process of prayer—to God, to a better and bigger self, to the atmosphere—writing can be a step toward unifying heart, mind, body, universe. Ginsberg's frenzied catalogue ends on "brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul"; Eliot's The Waste Land on "shantih," or "the peace that surpasseth understanding." Neither bang nor whimper, endings like these are at once humble and tenacious. They say "Amen" and step aside so that a greater wordlessness can work its magic.

I challenged him
burly ******* captain
stubbled beard as coarse as sandpaper
standing there in muggy dusk
arms akimbo,
mama san starched uniform stained with swagger and sweat

two silver captain's bars ******* any of my brilliance or bravado
all he had to do was speaketh the words
“need those maps, head out at 2230 hours”
and that was a death sentence
which was commuted to life
if four decades since has been life

there are not words for the black
of moonless jungle
except nothingness and paralytic fear
and through that lightless, lifeless, abyssness
I crawled, crouched and crept along
sometimes as slowly as the minute hand on my watch

the silence, the silence, the silence
became my splintered cross
to carry to my place of crucifixion
at my Calvary Hill behind barbed wire, blue lead barrels and
fearful eyes

silence, silence, silence, black wordlessness
black soundlessness
punctuated by shallow precious breaths
and imagined slant-eyed demons
waiting behind each berm
to turn the timeless night into timelessness
of more black

should I chamber a round?
and follow its solitary sound
into the silent holy night
and shatter my own fragile fright?
would that end this knowing without knowing?
and answer the question,
“is this fear worse than the answer?”
since questions have answers but answers have nothing
the nothing of which I was sure I would become a part
in the silence, the silence, the silence
of the black canopied jungle
in Tay Ninh Province
in 1967

where I was sentenced to death but allowed to live
in silent, black wordlessness
sentenced to live
to wonder, after all these years of shivering fright and flickering light
did the captain become a human?
And was I really allowed to live?

never fall in love with a boy who
speaks in lavender soliloquy and
smells like cigarettes and melancholy;
whose kisses leave you in nirvana and
whose flesh lays in some lovely façade;
for he is a poet, a philosopher, and a believer
whose mind will disappear into breathless purgatory
when you're not even looking
and by the time you'll find out
you'll already have lost him somewhere,
between wandering verbosity,
and ashen wordlessness

There I stood
In a long hallway
Stretching thinly
To a lit point

Lined with doors
Opening as they closed

Its prisms transposing
Euphoria as it shone

Lifting my chest
It dragged me breathless
Down its stretches

As I was reflected
In my own projections
Of sentients

Until innocence
Was all there is

And that is
Where thoughtless
Narrative lives

Where languidly it gives
Wordlessness meaning

And that is
Where fraughtless
Intentions can win

Acting replacing thinking

Incentive in Zen
Awaking and thinking again

Was is and gonna be
Everything I believe
Even while deceived
In sets of themes

Numeric categories
And the tragic stories
Of grander things

Things of grandeurous dreams
That I wring out in the sink
While winking
The well wishes away
In splashes
Of graying
Paint

My hate
Is displayed
In the mourning
Of Mondays

And with relatable monotony
And some mundane

Everything goes back to the same

Or at least
That's the philosophy

Never finding expectation to exist beyond the last known blip of the past, projected through my back, in tackled grounds, bound, in the banter of spectators, speculating the specifications of specialised  weaponry, silencing the empathy, and seducing my enemies in the isolated idolatry of their stupidity that i sculpted from the scrutiny, that was wished to have eluded me but soothed my playful solidarity to my sickly game called reap and sow instead.

We are all dead, all dead inside, residing in thriving wounds.

Left unsaid in rhymes etched in tombs.

In the lies of old bafoons

I shall not fight, myself, as they do, nor shall i defy whats right just to eat tonight.

I will fight until I am mine and sleep.

Cradled in my shrine of thoughts amiss, in the frost of loss vs reward.

I am torn, between torture and a vultures wait of the prize to pedal the pestilent pettiness to the edges of my testaments, in the truth of youth-less suicide, slicing social structures into cylinders to swing in circles around the room.

Swooning, in my looming threat of self immolation to warm the heart with shopping carts of satire, killing the sad away.

Delaying the the decay of hope.

A stay of patience in my irrelevance,never hesitant in my clever projections of nothing.

I feed you nothing

But emptiness

Shuttering in the sultry shade of my suffering and loving every moment of it.

Saying nothing too much in things of such insignificance.

Spilling the mizpellings and settling for wordlessness after a good ***** of belligerent arrogance.

Im tempted to quit but my wick is lit and to submit now, would just put the fire out and i want to watch the burn.

Heat waves in iced water.
Chilled moonshine on the scorching sun.
Blades of green earth on a long-lit fire.
Fresh-water creatures in the salty sea.

A glow, brighter than, and in the ocean of night.
A rock in the sky and birds that can't fly.
A whale on the beach with the sea out of reach. And Blossoms in a dark room.

An infant on his feet soon to fall into defeat.
Ever-greens in winter and ghosts in mid-day. Lungs underwater and gills in air. Like drugs in one's system that slowly pass through.

Owls at dawn, daylight birds in nocturnal song and eyes staring at the sun.
A snake on smooth surface and a worm on the rough.
Like a house cat in the wild mountains and rivers in suburban territory.

Like pillows stuffed with stones and a child with evil inside.
Free spirits in a cage and prisoners freed.
Like a stick in quick sand, a weighted mass floating on a light surface.
Like a dog, a cat and rat peacefully below one roof.

Like a beaten lion and a victorious antelope.
Like the colour of green against the shadow of black. Like hopping on concrete and civil wars. The hood in a college girl and a college girl in the hood.

Like curtains in the morning and yawning windows at dusk. Like an aged oak in the midst of a flood, like a water lily in the days of drought.
Like a forgotten pearl in a waste dump and fake gold on a woman's index.

Like a loud song muted by those who fear volume and a soft one forced to yell above its pitch.
Like a ladybug on a pesticide- poisoned crop.
Like a polar bear in the African Sahara.

Like a camel by the coast, ants with no work and busybodied sloths. A scarf in summer and crop tops in autumn. Plants dying in September and coming back to life in June.

Like a written-on page on a brand new day and wordlessness when that day is old and weary.
Like a torch at midnight. Like cellphones in a filled bath tub.

Like a fat man sprinting and the turtle losing the race. Like a homeless mother in a mansion.
Like a teenage girl with no tongue, and oppressors with no power.

Like David and Goliath, like a insane Albert Einstein. Like a flame on the ocean floor. Like me in this world, I shouldn't be, but I can be and I will be.

**** you for making me
Open my eyes to the
Outterness.

And for making me smile in my
Sleep.
Hell, I don't even know if I

Could ever fall for someone as
Perfect as your first-to-fifth
Digital

Impressions have made you
Out to be.
I zen my shoulders back down

And breathe, embracing the
Adventure of having even so much
As whispered to your

Shadow. Tomorrow
Or a decade's time away
Or a swift aeon's,

You'll be gone from my life.
I'll still be grateful.
No flower disregards

Even a second of petal-stroking
Sunlight.
In a world as dumb

As this one, your very being
Is a drop of supernova in a very
Silent *** of cosmic wordlessness.

I hope you're not
Scared of
Poets.

Cross the distance
Close the gap,
Make a stride traverse a
Infinite chasm.
Every pale replacement
Is a soft lie
Whispered inward
At a truth, a need
To accept that
The otherside has faded to myth;
Fallen to shadow.

Having recall
Of the way oasis feels
With certainty, the grass is greener
Back in the place
Filled with emerald eyes
White teeth smiles,
Skin like guilded earth.
These
Recollections
Made me certain I was touching eternity
When the waves brushed my skin.
There is wordlessness in this knowledge
A sublimity, a divine loneliness
Knowing the expanse that
Divides lands,
Stretching beyond sight, perception, and physicality
Feels like nothing
In the distance between us.

what kind of movement was it?
that brought the head to the knees
a curled spiraling whimper
unhitched to the winds round the room?
what kind of act,
blue through and through
could topple such bonds that were deeper?

what were the thoughts
that built up like bricks
due each meiotic mutation?
what brute could so brash
dried out heavy headed
to full careless crush
the gentlest swath
her two hands ?

where went the time
day by day through each slot
like coins I collected
each morning each night,
pearl afternoons

the glint off your brow,
the stoop of your chest the
scoop of your back-blades,
more leaves of memory
now slipped out by the breeze through my mind with a cry,
theived hollow,
out the window and gone

where now is the murmur of glow
with thunder softened out through the trees
electrons spinning the push of your atoms to mine
where now the wordlessness,
you with me?

It was raining and it was morning.
They sat in the car underneath a tree, upon a hill, overlooking the vast cemetery below.  Clichès still have the potential to be beautiful, they know. Intellectual awareness allows for understood symbolism, the death of that which dies at a cemetery, the emotional downpour demarcated by rain, the interstitial distance of looking forward and down.
Silence and language working symbiotically as a stratagem to both hide and reveal vulnerability.  The clichè of their location works with the conversation.
He is sad. She knows.
She knows the emotional location he lives within, she purposefully disregarded his eyes, those eyes that have always stared at her from the mirror, her eyes. The eyes of those with hollow love for themselves. The selfishness of selflessness, the facticity of unfortunate neurological tendencies, the self-imposed limitations.
They speak. He speaks.
She hears him speak, she who is devoid of empathy, she reaches empathy through his words, she hears the thesis of her own thoughts, she cries. She cries because he narrates her perception of herself, through narrating his perception of himself, and she knows the meaning of it.
He cries because it is his.
He looks away.
He says I don't want you to know the things about me. The things that are disgusting.
She loves those things. It's not enough. She knows.
She talks to herself, she talks to him.
She takes his hand, they cling to the ephemeral union.
It stops raining.
They walk into the chapel, the ashes of those who lived resting upon glass bookshelves, behind glass cases. They sit upon a couch in silence. They collapse, against each other.
Two women observe the marble of the mausoleum.
They arise. The women are startled. The women didn't see them sitting; they were three feet away.
He takes her home. They fade into wordlessness during the drive. They look at each other with desperation at a stop sign.
She says goodbye. She walks away.
They walk away.