Road Home

The Laying on of Hands (1997)

So this is the way it happens. Somewhere around 3:00 a.m. in a bed not made for blood and screams, women hold the woman you love while you haul medical supplies, sterile implements, and oxygen tanks (just in case) from the midwife's warm Taurus in the driveway. All the while you're thinking, no, not now, in the morning maybe, the afternoon's better. You had everything planned: people to pray, a ceremony to honor the seven directions, something to beckon the deer and the wolf. And you were even wise enough to think of the elders. But, now, you forget to light the candles, and far away, the elders are sleeping, cheap paperbacks spread wide like curtains over their exhausted hearts. And the prayer people across town dream of a man falling, tumbling through howling clouds, toward seas heaving at the waning moon. It is at this hour that you return to yourself, and remember what you knew before you knew how to plan, before you began scheduling your epiphanies. It is at this hour that you remember that only empty hands can cup the light, that mercy visits only when the last appointment has ended. So when you are called--If you're going catch this baby, you better do it now!--there is no other way but to kneel since kneeling is demanded, to bow before the only heaven our body will ever know, to pull life, wet and frightened, into your palms and place him on the altar of his mother's breasts.