Mollusk

In a mollusk of prayer, yearning chafes the sandy grit of "I" into a pearl. That is why it must not be cast out. The motion of the tides will turn it into something beautiful.

Pain does not redeems us, but the crystal hollow we allow around the wound. Why not become a shell of forgiveness, crush bone to jewel, marinate in grief salt, let in the moon?

The presence of Our Lady in this inhalation would confuse me if my flesh had not suffered love's secret. Longing melts edges, encrusts the formless with gems, churns emptiness into buttermilk.

Fold in lemony stars, mountains, spice forests, terrifying mushrooms. Then behold the shivering kelp-tangled goddess who stands on the shore, her gaze refracted through my vast green shadow.

She wonders what lives down here among crustacean silences. I answer with my final exhalation, a rosary of bubbles, "No one who still has a name, and does not weep, can sip from this savory grail."

She asks why the world is spun so wondrous strange. How my soul became a vacant swirling eddy, captured by the gravity of blackness.

Why night is swallowed up inside me, like an absence full of diamonds. Why, at birth, I received an unfathomable touch from the Beloved, here, in my lungs.

 She wants to know whose gentle glance might finally open the tomb, the lips, the well of tears, the mollusk of my prayer. I tell her: "Only the midsummer moon, and the breath of the Beloved, could unseal my heart tonight."


Photo by Peter Shefler