At night I held the moon’s yellowed skin

       between my teeth, night’s breath     on my palms, 

              swallowed every river. Punctuated my strokes

              with panic, rocks

opened my scars, daytime came pouring out.

God named me, then,      in pulses of time,

              said       Let there be light. He

tore open His rivers,        His aphelion planets—

       fractalling,       spectral, their heavy-lidded

                                   eyes        mottled 

              and inky. Before He spoke, He let    

fat        spoons of evening               flare across me,

their wingless bodies wrinkled

     and fetal. I can’t remember exactly, 

        but when He reached               into the water

       to save me my soul was        wrought haloid,

each    hanging gibbous a sunspot in my vision,       a penumbra

       undone. He told me I’d              sleep now, 

                            for only a        little while.

       Said He’d been listening, zenithlike. How astronomers

                     are always breaking His universe

       into palm-       sized cinders;        how we burn.

How when I open my mouth to speak 

                     my body becomes ecliptic, solar,

       my voice wells with a        red haze. I try to speak and find

              I cannot look directly at Him. You, He says, and

in His mouth my name sounds like water evaporating,

       a remembered promise, 

              His breath halving the night.  

Dawn breaks:     the galaxies        held together like fists,

              perched in the humming     of our oscillating entropy; 

                     an abyss;       a swathed lagoon;       a place

I could be whole again                            in prayer.