Wine-Dark Tides

i.

Some days I feel I am a victim
of God’s forgetfulness.
Forgetful God, do you not remember
that you made me?—
I never asked for existence.
Now,
with blood
journeying
from heart
     to artery
          to capillary
     to veins,
returned to heart,
I wonder, why
give me these ebbing
               and flowing
cavities to sustain
my being only
to let me feel
my own emptiness?

Why beset me with desire
and not supply its fulfillment?

ii.

And yet today,
my body has more hope
than my consciousness
can muster.
Never mind
that as soon as I inhale,
my lungs
     deflate
as I exhale,
when I, most days,
choose not to make my bed
because it will be messy again.

In dark recesses
within me,
my body prepares
a primordial room
to nurture life.
Never mind
that there has been nothing
but waiting.

With heaviness,
this custodian
gathers up the sheets.
She returns,
and makes up the bed again.
There is no reason
this time could not be different.

Perhaps it is in this
returning,
this listening
to your silence
in these spaces,
in rhythms of
filling and emptying,
     preparing and waiting
that is already
the echo
of your answer
sustaining me
     through
these wine-dark tides.