My prayers no longer held any relation to those I had recited with my father as a child. They were small and personal. Pebbles thrown into the river. Words murmured over the cooking fire and sung into a puddle of rainwater.

No. I wanted a tree. A storm. A disaster. Someone huge and strong and rooted. Someone who was of the ground and the water and the sky.

The great bird carried away these concerns. It swooped down into the garden toward some unsuspecting heart, hidden like a gem in a handful of silken fur,

night that was so dense with pollen, with perfume, with moonlight, that it was less a color and more a material. It was a skin I walked into and felt smoothly adhere to the curves of my body.

But this was the work of the spirit. Her body and her being were perfectly aligned

To sleep and awaken was a miracle.

beings made of blood and breath, so insubstantial we could scatter in the invisible breeze.

I felt at once the fragility of my body and, at the same time, the certainty that I was something more than my body: indestructible, huge, and ceaseless.

It reminded me of a dreamer struggling to wake but finding he has gone in the opposite direction: dreaming himself into an even deeper sleep.