Jagged with Love

To Prayer

TO prayer I. Your hands are quick and free, one day crossing the harp and one day the loom, neither ofwhich you heed enough. Your hands swim the long bowl of some shore in America, which itself is a kind of shore, spooled by a dark set of longings. You are almost rotten through with a love you cannot name. Somewhere, someone thinks about crying, someone fashions a sloppy basket, someone enjoys an afternoon thick with wine and slabs of rye. You hear these things: guitars, crickets, coughing, half ofAugust in a day. Hands cannot hold these things as surely as ears, and blood does not belong in either but in the lissome cup of the body, its hollows, its handles. II. Today you press them together for anyone who loved Jayjay Escolar. The men who killed her had hands like yours, they gripped her shirt and bowed her neck, opened her legs, cracked her jaw. Hands will take an eight-year-old on a shortcut home from school. Ifthe ribbon of splendor unfurls in exact amounts, you hold the sounds of rhododendron amongyour teeth and brush your wrists over campanulate flowers, all the showy clusters her mother mentioned, all the leathery leaves. Your fIngers are steeple-stiff, your palms fleshy as a California peach. Your mouth pleads the small bird back to God, your tongue a rapid wing. This is the quarter moon you never saw, the brush soaking in thinner. This is the body that breaks, and today it was a Filipino girl you did not know. 66 III. Were you with her? mapping a new way home from school, maybe humming somethingyou thought she knew, unclipping her hair as she turned another corner of Baguio City. No, you were not there. You're still in the chapel, opened or opening. These are seeds onyour face, and you knowyou have done your work. Your hands are bones, rivers, conundrum: the patter of knuckles on the pew. Jay-jay-Jay-jay. The old sun sliding down your chest, the old sky, fmgerprints on a pane you cannot touch. ...