Spirit I was, I thought
this meant the heart

could be a burning bush
consuming, not consumed

by God. God’s luminous
atomic frisson, a perpetual

exstasis, the kind beyond
heat and light, beyond still waters,

beyond green. To red-rocked
places where a body’s forged

into a tong, my slender bones
by brilliance singed. And how,

when I was a girl, a poet
showed me a moth’s life

extinguishing in flame, its body
wickt with wax that had

ensnared it. How it irradiated
night and threw its shadow

in the looming trees. How holy
a young girl can be in her desire

for vanishing, to shape shadows
against walls by way of her

consumption, believe such
dying is the price of making

even what can’t stay.

Spirit I was, I thought the desert
fathers knew a way I couldn’t know

into becoming. But first the moth’s
a worm, and then a shroud.

Suffer the little silkworm come.
The fire is all your longings lit.

Before your slender skein can lift,
your shed skin’s wound and rent.

You can’t keep yourself apart.
A body’s every urge a filament

between bright wings and iridescent dust,
unfurled in conflagration, copulation,

mess. Your wonted flesh a more accessible
transcendence. And every lip

against your temple,
a flame’s devouring lick –