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.