Praise for My Maker

I have admitted to you before that while I am not a "sing out loud" guy, I often find myself singing a hymn, or whistling while I am walking outdoors. There is something in the experience which elicits praise, and the hymns tell me that I instinctively connect this praise with my Maker. I came across this poem by Tony Hoagland in a recent issue of Orion magazine:

Instead

The deer they said would be there at dawn

never appeared but the dawn mist instead.
Always something instead

like the little brown pebble on the porch

that turned out to be a frog.
Things that arrive on their own

like the domed Conestogas of afternoon cloud,

fat as senators from Mississippi.
How there is always a truth, and then underneath that

another somehow more elusive truth —
All before the pell-mell education of dying

when things will be fast but at the same time slow,

like the loud dripping of a clock.
Instead of the quiet you never noticed

hailstones of rain on the roof,

after which you could hear the wind.
So praise instead;

praise the word instead like a treetrunk

that falls across your path.
Like a bridge that leads away from your destination.
You had expected to be dead by now,or living in New York.
Mist suspended above the meadow:

pale and gauzy, in rumpled sheets;

where you have come with so much readiness.

- Tony Hoagland