​On the Accomplishments of Prayer

​
As the cellist hugs rosewood curves
between her knees, its steel leg 
scratches against porch cement.
With fervent and meticulous invocation
she draws back the bow.  Headlong
she pours a river of notes past 
the birdbath and darkening hedges.

Finally she begins to work  
six tones with relentless, 
small twists, shivers, exhalations
until she raises an architecture of helices 
as quick and complex 
as those raveled within DNA.

God knows, she is drunk enough now
to reach into things and trace,
say, the arc of a quark's movement.
To sound a woman's 
split in-half shriek
as her first-born crops.

Under fluorescent light in a nearby garage 
a man in blue apron bends over a grinder.
In another house, a woman bathing 
strokes a loofa along the site 
of an old mastectomy scar.
Nearby, the Hoffsteaders
chat politics over wine and fish 
with a couple they met 
through their daughter's preschool.  

Around each of these people 
rests a cold nimbus, 
frozen distance,  
like that which surrounds 
stars in night sky.

Only this woman with her bow and cello 
who has become possessed
by what she has always heard
inside of her veins 
is not alone.