Below the Metaphor

What prayer, what god? At five a.m., the quiet in me unfolds into something wordy. Thusly comforted, thusly settled. We are not bodies precisely but guests, and not guests precisely but strangers given to teaching the collective how to love what it yet doesn't recognize. When the wind blows one thinks of the horses bearing with it. One thinks of loose hay skating across the frozen snow. If I grieved once, I do not grieve now, and if I laughed once, I do not laugh now. The ceremony, begun a long time ago, at last becomes my attention. A great river is our love and if I sometimes flail as it flows to the sea, well, like the rest of us I am learning. Jesus visits often now, vast and specific, willing into the languaging brain a previously forbidden dialogue. Shall I sink below the metaphor? The dark is a fructive soil and we are seeds not calculations. Something stirs on my left shoulder, something else insists it is finished. Are we were long ago or are yet to come? Between this breath and the next, Her unique alleluia and my nontrivial - presently borrowed - wings. This world, Beloved, it is made of moonlight.