Prayer

Once I wandered into the woods so long
that, thinned, fasting and open, I fell into a dream.

I watched myself seep into leaf litter and tiny bones
of small creatures like a pool of pulsing blood,

the night’s darkness passed through me with the sweep of a ragged cloak.

As the tracks of wild animals drew close to my dreaming body
so too ancient memories drew close, scenting and tracking the

fugitive shape of my own life’s story to this point.
It’s many wounds and unanswered questions.

Until, laid down on leafy floor, I looked up at a cracked arterial canopy
longed for a language of reverence

A language of root, bones, and leaves
Of ancestors, memory and a pulse of trust

Was that a prayer?  

 I did not know who to pray to, knowing no god that I could name,
And in naming know, as well as my hand, or my friends, or the sky.

I prayed for someone to pray to. The forest itself pulsed with prayer,
through threads that rans from my heart and lungs to the forest floor

to tangled fabrics of sunflesh and the business of ants,
Through threads that hold me up, threads that once snapped,

Will drop my body to earth like limb-tangled puppet,
No longer and never myself no more.

As I lay on the leaf litter in the dream fractured real,
My story bleeding from me like a wounded ghost

I prayed without knowing how, as if all my perceptions were
a kind of bread that might feed the animal fabric of forest

It wasn’t a petition for intervention from a high power,
it was a desire to become angel-bread

And in that desire, this sense that the prayed to needs the pray-er
As I needed the state of mind that prayer grants,

That we were woven together like the Sun weaves the root,
Woven together like tastebuds to fruit.