Prayer from a Mouse
Dimensionless One, can you hear me? Me with the moon ears, caught in ice branches? Beneath the sky’s long house, beneath the old snake tree, I pray to see even a fragment of you— whiskers ticking a deserted street, a staircase leading to the balcony of your collarbone. Beloved King of Stars, I cannot contain my animal movements. For you I stay like a mountain. For you I stay like a straight pin. But in the end, the body leaves us its empty building. Midnight petulant as a root cellar. Wasps crawling in sleeves. I sleep with my tail over my face, enflamed. Oh Great Cataloguer of Snow Leaves, I pray that you may appear and carry every piece of my fur in your hands.
Credit
Copyright © 2013 by Sarah Messer. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on November 29, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
About this Poem
"I wanted to write a devotional poem to a being who is vast and unreachable, and to emphasize this distance, I made myself into a mouse and the Beloved into the Dimensionless One. The poem tries to address an intense, impossible longing. What if I could see the face of the Beloved even for a moment? The poem became a prayer for that possibility, that chance."
—Sarah Messer
Date Published
11/29/2013