A Body Shaped Like The Wilderness

Just as Christ was in Mary

there is prayer inside the breath,

a soul inside the soul,

one who watches

and one who weeps,

a body shaped like the wilderness

inside the body,

made of dark matter and fire.

Just as Christ was in Mary,

there is energy in silence.

When evening falls,

stars populate the blackness 

of zero

with countless powers of minus 1.

The Magdalene holds up an egg.

Her eyes long to tell us

what she will not say.

Where is her voice?

Where is yours?

Spring trembles in white bones,

but the marrow is burnt umber.

Within the egg,
is it light or shadow,

or some green yearning
inside green?

She will not speak, yet she sings

a canticle of silence
that rises

out of the belly of all things.

A ululation
that passes over her tongue

like wind at night without a husband.

Just as Christ was in Mary,

love is burning, born 

of aloneness.


Painting of Magdalene by Robert Lentz, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

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