I Say You Are

Some say you are not your body.

I say your body is an ocean of suns

whose ancient light is only now arriving.

I say the fiery dark abyss devouring time

is the well of your next inhalation.

And if you and God won’t rendezvous

in a crow-footed wrinkle or a liver spot,

flesh petals on a stem of thorns

in this aching fallow-fallen meadow,

how will you taste the bloom and fade

of lips on the heavenly Christ Rose?

Sink into one molecule of skin.

Gaze through crazy windows of a quark

on photon moons in supernova nuclei,

threading your ancestral darkness

to an unborn star. Beyond astonishment,

be pollen floating in a beam of what sees,

the glory of loam (I say you are) this body,

descended yet risen from loss,

from yearning so chthonic no god could fall

this low, never having tippled the sky

in a chalice of dust, an atom of the dead.

The ringing of bells you hear is your own

exhalation, a carcanet of diamonds,

hollow as the worlds to come.

I say you are this body, and more.

Stunned by your mortal magnificence,

why not become the black vacuum

at the core of all that whirls?

Why not use the faintest feather brush

of breath on bone to dust the mind away,

and be the silence that has all along

been listening to your prayers?

Photo: Arnie Chou, Pexels