One-Armed Prayer

I.
You know that
I was born in a country
where church bells outsound
the reasoned cries of the murdered.
You know that I know nothing of the cold
slide into a second birth, communion, consecration,
consummation, other than what your body
has taught me. You know I was there
that morning among the patient
sly naiveties of the faithful
because you were.

II.
A hunched church, so big it contains
its own wind, the incense so heavy,
it’s elemental. You light a candle,
add to the glowing undulations—
grasping claws of tensile yellow
below skeleton blues whose delicate
tracery wafts into thin witnessed air—
and to the slow movement of brooding
shadow. The altar in its discolored
gold is henlike, too. You return
to stand beside me, who stands
beyond the edge of this gathering,
facing in the same direction as you
but without seeing what you see
with the attentive eyes of a saint,
the fevered light of your candle
only that, a baited vertical smear
of fire; really, I’m only seeing you,
your profile in lilted contemplation,
my altarpiece. Your silence near
my shoulder more distant, loud,
and foreign than the robed, burly,
bearded hypnotist’s chant, farther
than the oblique elation of the chant’s
climax, as oblique as your marble
countenance. Maybe that’s part
of the elation: a sustained ascension.
A fire that feeds on itself until
snuffed. But never is. Somewhere,
like a high dome, its flame still looms.

III.
Outside, the wind careened through the broad leaves of plane trees
and you shed your immanence layer by layer as we walked
toward noon, the attention of your body turned
toward mine. Now at night my body
curves around your absence,
a posture of faith
I know now
that I know without
knowing, like the knowledge
that still resides in muscle memory,
like the embers of our nerve endings that may yet
reignite, like the reach of a phantom limb that somewhere
will consummate in touch—that is how I hope that I’ve lost you.