Jessy Murphy - One Poem

Hot Prayers from Public Spaces

You're sweating vodka. I'm feeling Russian

now. Twisted shut eyelids like shellfish, closed, full

of enigmatic life. I almost can't understand your fish

talk. What is this caviar conversation? How absurd, I

think to myself. I'm only imagining the talking between us.

Our communication? Hah! You're only silent. Squinting

tight, kneeling, sweating.

What if you were a monk kneeling before exquisitely shaped

gold or view of unimaginable mountains--praying to the beat

of the wind chime or the bones in your hand you try to count and say

a new prayer for each. A monk on fire. Set yourself to flames.

Torching, praying by the pain--the deafening lack of thought

replaced with more sensible curling flesh and roasting holy

smell somehow transforms into sound, into sight also. Every sense

engulfed and made dumb. You are a senseless--first time so

meaningful--mass of the physical. The soul has left through the nose

as confining tiny hairs, such gentle skin glowed deep, bright.

So much pain and something else. It is--

They were unfathomable mountains. Snow, bright, spiders, silk.

Not that I am comparing myself to a holy illusion. Maybe your kneeling

here is not like a monk, after all. There was something so Himalayan

in the Russian image of you I conjured and, momentarily, replaced you

with. Russian because I smelled vodka and immediately thought of that

banned-in-Vietnam portrait of Putin, so demure in a lacy wedding gown.

Perhaps one could even argue that you are not really kneeling before me at all.

More like I saw you here on the ground, bent over, cocooning in your own form

and stood in front of you, suddenly feeling robe-and-crownish to watch

your silky, wet madness.

Jessy Murphy writes from San Antonio, TX.