At Night in the House of My Body

 

There is only one language

and it’s prayer.

 

The gist is this:

Body, be my shelter.

Let me not impede

upon your sublimity.

Help me to restore

order if I do.

You are my house,

my only home.

I am the spirit

who haunts you;

a dove making

its nest in your steeple.

 

When we sleep

we linger at the door

daring to turn the knob

with our teeth,

breathing through

the keyhole,

ever curious toward

the other side.

 

If freed from you,

would there again be

the prospect of love,

of being courted,

of being saved

from ourselves

by ourselves

outside the room

of our selves?

 

Freed from the daily

adaptation to pain, 

we would again feel

capable of anything.

 

Here, where

our hands still work,

and our feet tread

without complaint,

with no need for glasses

to see what's true,

our teeth return

to their mouths;

a necklace of

salvaged pearls

from the depths

smiling their way through

memories that mean little

to anyone but us.

Yet we would not trade them

for fear the way back

lay by way of

a hole

in the ground.

 

Maybe

only on the other side

will we know what’s true

is all that’s real.

 

With no need

for clothes

we leave behind us

the tyranny

of to do lists,

clocks that held

our faces in place,

smells to remember

other lives by.

Now 

with no need for art,

  only the none-too distant 

prospect of waking

can we find our way.

 

At night in the house

of our bodies

we are errant children,

daring to be homeless

in hopes of regaining

a splendor

as bright as 

a single day.

11/3/23