Plumbing

Atheist

On a day when a pipe breaks or

there’s no hot water or

the toilet won’t flush

I think of the give and take of

fluids in and out of my house

and of the man or men

who have come to mend it,

the plumbers with their

wrenches and tubing and fittings

who finally attend to my need for

a warm bath and the odorless removal

of my old shit; my house is my church,

my place of prayer against disasters,

floods, decay and drowning and

given my clumsy way with practical

things, with economic survival, with

cars that wear and break, with a house

that needs care in its old age,

my plumber with his tools

on the floor in the kitchen

is my angel on his knees praying to a god

who insists only that he meet him

halfway to bliss, by grunting and sweating and

bending and solving and finally rising,

turning the faucet on and off and on,

thus satisfied with water again

flowing silently out of my house

into some place known to him

and his god, but some place

as strange to me as heaven.