There’s a church where I sit
on my lunch hour when the silence
within me cries out for its counterbalance
without—the only sounds the clinks

and clanks of old radiators working
in winter and birds nesting
up in the buttresses in spring,
the mediated mumble of traffic

and the echoing feet of those who come
like me for a reason—expressed
or only a wild guess.
I sit near a statue—some saint
with keys—from whose upraised hand drops
blank grace I swallow like a stone.