Purchase

I see with mine eye
a light
at the inner crossroads,
the chords of karma are delicate
fine enough to tangle into knots:
and it begins between the brows.
Now, Arjuna draws his arrow
a lamp or a lamb
at the organ and the song
that heart-shaped chamber
still at rest, sleeping
waiting for the breath;
I take one.
the gallon of air

I can hold onto, and feel

the coursing pulse
in every other orifice, the millions
of hollow cylinders that keep
this skin of mine pinned,
held up to the pattern
like the dressmaker her cotton
into prisms translucent made
in the window (my grandfather
was a Jewish tailor in Brooklyn;
surely I can mend this garment,
without pricking my finger?)
and the glow of the heavenly mind.
I will keep time with each beating
the slow glide of spirit,
the shuttle of the loom,
each time my foot drops,
a new line of threads
come ascendant through
between the spaces of words,
imprinted on this interior
this woven tapestry .
Perhaps I was purchased at birth
for unity.
One more day of this
and I will surely lie down
in the winter garden, and know
instantly, irrefutably
about the secret of the sleeping
trees and the sap that slows
to regenerate
each photosynthesis
when the sun is right-side-up again.
This ain't about religion,
this is about being
All of it and wearing
no name,
responding to no calling
but the resounding surge
of a marine-biological mother
and the small boat I have sewn
with blood and silk and battlements,
fingertips and Hannibal's elephants
to sail across the Euphrates river.