Poem-A-Day: Prayer from a Mouse by Sarah Messer

November 29, 2013 Prayer from a Mouse by Sarah Messer Dimensionless One, can you hear me?  Me with the moon ears, caught  in ice branches?    Beneath the sky's long house,  beneath the old snake tree,  I pray to see even a fragment  of you--  whiskers ticking    a deserted street,  a staircase leading  to the balcony  of your collarbone.    Beloved King of Stars, I cannot  contain my animal movements.    For you I stay like a mountain.  For you I stay like a straight pin.    But in the end, the body leaves us  its empty building.    Midnight petulant  as a root cellar. Wasps crawling  in sleeves. I sleep    with my tail over  my face, enflamed.    Oh Great Cataloguer  of Snow Leaves, I pray  that you may appear  and carry every piece  of my fur in your hands.          Copyright © 2013 by Sarah Messer. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem "I wanted to write a devotional poem to a being who is vast and unreachable, and to emphasize this distance, I made myself into a mouse and the Beloved into the Dimensionless One. The poem tries to address an intense, impossible longing. What if I could see the face of the Beloved even for a moment? The poem became a prayer for that possibility, that chance." --Sarah Messer Most Recent Book by Messer Bandit Letters (New Issues, 2001)            Poem-A-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day Archive.    Sarah Messer is the author of three books of poems, including Bandit Letters (New Issues, 2001). Her third book, Dress Made of Mice, is forthcoming from Black Lawerence Press. She divides her time between Wilmington, North Carolina, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she works at White Lotus Farms. Related Poems Me and the Otters  by Dorothea Lasky  Quiet the Dog, Tether the Pony by Marilyn Chin  Skunk Hour by Robert Lowell  __________________________ Rae Armantrout is the judge for the 2014 Walt Whitman first book award. Submit your manuscript online. Deadline: December 1.     Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.

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