Nighttime At The Christian Retreat Poem by Mike Finley

The men who have been praying all day
Lay down their souls like cufflinks to the Lord.
And in a while the snoring starts, first in one cot,
Then in another, and soon each man
Is making his offering of oxygen.
There are thirty men under this roof
And not one is a drinker any more but maybe
We were all dropped on our faces as babies
Or maybe we have a greater than average population
Of former boxers, noses broken by a left jab,
Gladiators laid out on the Coliseum floor
gasping through a spatter of blood.
And the sum is like a song played on a rank of snouts
Like a choir of hogs assembled in crates,
Grunting and rooting and squealing for God.
Where the intake is a truck wheezing up a steep hill
And low gear holds the runaway in check
For if they leave the road they have set out on
They will backslide and their exertions will have failed.
Up a hill, down a hill, the night is an oscilloscope
Of panting crescendos and snorting diminuendos
On a Wurlitzer organ pneumatically powered.
The roof heaves up, the roof subsides,
Like the ribs of a whale with thirty men inside
Detoured from their journey to Nineveh.
And the night is the irreplaceable pearl
That we beat the shrubs by our houses to find
That we turn out every cushion, flip over every rug,
That we pry up the hardwood of our hearts to locate
But it is not there until we surrender,
Like the flushed faces of boys on their pillows
From the exertion of long days of play,
Like the din of a great brass gong, hung from a rope,
Fashioned by the hammering
Of a thousand earnest craftsmen,
Or the groan of a lamasery, chanting like smoke
High up on a dream Himalaya.