This Room, This Chair – a poem by Elisabeth Weiss

This Room, This Chair
 
If I come to this room, this chair
each evening post dinner and light the way
for words to appear, there is no guarantee,
no change of the night’s direction
but still it is the only way I can pray.
 
Like a clockwork spring
the key in the crown is just a part
of a larger mechanism.
 
If I knew what my life was for or 
if there was a grid to guide my hand
then maybe these lines are for what
draws the mind out of its hiding place
and that alone aligns with a faith
worth puzzling over.

Elisabeth Weiss teaches writing at Salem State University, in Salem, Massachusetts. She’s published poems in London’s Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, the Birmingham Poetry Review, the Paterson Literary Review and many other journals. Lis won the Talking Writing Hybrid Poetry Prize for 2016. Her chapbook, The Caretaker’s Lament, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016.