a prayer.

I want to catch myself in a moment of humility and immobilize,
Pin my entire body in that position like a captured butterfly
And press it into your palm, a flower between your pages.

There, in the files of signifiers and signifieds,
I will be as silent and slow as the bow of a rose:
her private obeisance to the weight of the rainfall.

Like the boughs in the winter worship the snow,
Bending their bodies at the dragging hem of its robe
Because they know the piety of
What collects sound without addition or distortion
And refracts light without absorption.

We all know.

Dear Lord, make me one of those mute mirrors
Cupped in the palms of the firs, face upward.
Make me a single flake in that congregation.
I will soak in every sound:
A listening so pure it consumes the spoken whole
And makes no reply or observation.

Bend me like snow bends both light and bough
Like a knee at the altar, the prism,
Unprison my receptivity.
Vanish me into reflectivity.

I want to hug the entire mountainside
Like one of those great white blankets,
Cradle the cold land in my arms
And coax it to sleep beneath my quietude.

And when I am done, and my white powdered bones
Finally melt and drip from their limbs,
I will soak, swim back into the soil, and disperse
With all this bundled in my arms
And release it, to rinse the earth.

(the sack-cloth torn, white ash is scattered, the child is born)

It will not yield

despite my pleading and fist-to-chest-beating
It will not wheel or deal
In relinquishing meaning
It will not cheat its own secret-keeping
Nor bleed or interbreed
with inferior species of speeches
It will not teach me, nor acknowledge my seeking
But it keeps a gold eye on these proceedings
Watching my weeping, reading, bookkeeping
And vain attempts at sneaking into its skein
With undisguised disdain,

Yellow-skin-sealed.
It will not yield.

Aside, a token moon-like eggshell, broken
and crumbled beneath my curled fingernail
glued by oxidized blood
shards of a fossilized veil
that might be mistaken, on a good day,
for fragments of castaway mail
and might be mistaken, on a blind-fingered day,
for snatches of song in Braille

from my friends,
waiting out back
toeing and and acting, eyes averted
(mine too)
down a line running oblique to the fact
that most of what we do
is meaning, diverted
a light that we all see,
but braided beyond recognition
or else absurdly inverted
into the yellow of a yoke we collectively pull
attached to a skein recklessly unspooled
into which we pitch,
but are incontrovertibly girded

tugged along by some giant way up ahead
whose footfall we feel, and fills us with dread
and the length of the skein trembles taut,
entangles and webs

but it will not yield.

But me, I spend my time inside, hunched
on a spare wooden chair,
trying to conjure a lunch
from an uncompromisingly empty plate

On ink, predominately blue-dyed
nestled between meticulous lines,
broken eggshell aside:
the yolk, intact
unmitigated fact
regally sealed, obstinate, glowingly wheeled

(of course) it will not yield

so I examine from alternate angles,
I falter, wrangle,
prod and push:
"core of life, burning bush
eternal tangle
hub of world's unbroken spoke
bud of my stutter, breath of my babble"
I choke, I strangle
"holy yolk! holy meal!"
I croak
"uncloak! reveal!"

but it will not yield

under the great unsparing yellow-eyed stare,
no artificial fluorescent incandescence
can whisperingly unbend to unveil an essence
(that I only half-suspect, these days, is there)

no incantation of mine
no hoax or rhyme
can undisguise this
can coax or hitch its way
into reality, into the skein

we are soaring through pain
on clicking wings of clocks

the safety hatch is locked
you can't
jump off
this plane.

some girls are so beautiful

some girls are so beautiful that they break your heart before
they ever open their mouths

and when they do, their words go through
so many revolutions in the air
and bounce back between so many mirrors
that they are blind, white noise by the time they reach you

and so you nod

and apologize under your breath
when they duck their heads to tuck a piece of gleaming hair
or they turn their long and muscled neck
to catch a glimpse of something
they hope to be half as beautiful as the simple act
of their turning --

you apologize that they are the wives that we covet

whether we are wives or we want them
you apologize that you can't hear their words
the way they mean them
you apologize that to some, they are nothing more
than a sin

than a dark and tempting thought,
than the guilt of desire undesired
or the rabid rouge of desire desired

you apologize that they are the object of so many sentences
quietly regretted.

I am sorry
because you did not ask for this.

And I say it to the ugly woman too.

I am sorry
because you did not ask for this.

I am sorry for my thoughts
and for all the others.