RELUCTANT PRAYER FOR A WINTER SOLSTICE

O merciful attrition
of a wholly
deterministic universe—
I suppose
I have no choice
but to worship
the prior conditions, to reify
the mechanistic
paths and the
friction coefficients
you've already chosen,
to love this
sunken face
of the globe that I live on,
even though it's tilted
so off-balance, so
plunged into
darkness and frozen—because
any minute now,
the whole
show—each face I know,
every mountain, any last
mote of
dust which has ever
floated past—all of it
is just
only now fixing
to turn back around.