I

The Book somewhere says

                           We break our hearts open when we pray, and spill forth. The blood 

                           in our heart is made of light. Because we are human, we bleed as such.

So I chanted to myself, “This body is made for worship.” Almost a vesper.

And willed my chest to burst into strings of blue light.

But my voice is always a far-off windcall, half-asleep in the arms of the next life. My anklebone

catches the last sun from the silver anklet. I wished I could forget how to speak.

“This body is made for worship,” I hear in my sleep that night, where I—

Couldn’t write a name that does not shape Yours on my tongue

Couldn’t paint a face that does not sing Yours in the dark

Couldn’t trace my silhouette in the mirrors and not feel Your hands take hold of mine.

                          II

The Book somewhere speaks of

                           A place inside the mortal flesh. Where there is a pain, a longing, 

                           bathed in light. Glass to glass, skin to skin, shadow to shadow. 

I ache for this thing with no rigid form. I clothe it in Your clothes.

Your hands reach out through the mirror and cleave my chest. I call it Your name.

I look at myself through the thousand and one eyes between Your shoulder blades—

The Book somewhere says that

                           The human body is art, a traced image 

                           of everything meant to be holy and breakable. 

But this body is not quite mine, in this viscous place inside the mortal flesh.

So when I give it Your name, my body begins to metamorphose.

“This body is made for worship,” I hear in my sleep.

When I look at my hands, my bones split into branches—

Age-old banyan or ashwattha. Soft kisses of jarul flowers in May. Blood-carpet of hijal. Orange

suns of kodom shivering in the rain. Krishnachura and her relentless flame.

“Here,” You say, and lead me to the riverbed where roots meet. “Drink.”

I do, from the dead river, in that silent place between the light and the heart.

I look at myself through Your eyes. My hands tremble. Water spills from my hands to Yours.

                          III

I say, “This body is made for worship,” but the wind carries my voice away before it is heard.

I see myself through the eyes between Your shoulder blades

And I’m more an image, than a body, of a moment’s fragment;

This moment, the only moment—humming vespers and trading flesh

Kissing each eye and drinking Your breath from the river with roots.

The Book somewhere praises

                           Water and its morbid pride. How water is the flow of light. 

                           How worship is the art of letting water shape you.

I could never peer into the calm of its surface and not see You. From when in a dream, You said,

“Drink,” and the dead river erupted into a gushing stream. As I drank, it spilled from the gap of

my fingers. You smiled, your fingers pierced my heart, and I did not have to will my chest to rain

light anymore.

                          IV

If this body is made for worship

What better art than to become?

                           Light to light, water to water.

                           The shape of all things holy.

So when I wake up next blazing noon with the taste of rootsap and eyelashes under my tongue,

and draw my face on earth with black ink of burned hay, between the smell of grass and sorrow,

in the shallow place among stretches of yawning paddy fields,

I draw myself and I’m more roots than a body

More a vesper gliding over mirror and water and light

More an image that morphs and re-morphs, shaping my face into God’s.