Prayer Candle

Prayer Candle

I strike a half-chewed match,

to light my meditation candle. I watch

the yellow fish with the vermillion slipstream

dig,

with acid blue lips

into voiceless wax cylinders.

They were green or violet, to begin with, then white

and now red. They make scents for a while,

bleeding into skewbald reefs between sand-grains

every day,

and sweating into smoke. I watch this naked

ichthyologic archetype of everything that is

flames insist with undulant fluke strokes

to dive

past the waxy crater’s pastel depression

into viscous and deepening seas.

I burrow this abyssal column, probing

in my little faux comet’s wake:

When will I?

Where will I?

With whom will I?

What will we?

How will we?

God, will we?

With each whispered word

the fish flicks its fluke, too cutely, shimmying

shimmering muscles of molten brass.

I relent, then

sigh and blow the light away most nights,

wondering if what I search for is not

dark matter, a denizen of unfathomed space:

a dusky octopus inking, ghostly. Smoke wisps

rise into the wind and escape. I want to

see a flame turn on its wick

and unmoor

and leap

and unfurl its latent incendiary plumage.

I want to see the fire that flies

out of curtained, upstairs rooms

and alights upon entire communities,

gingerly setting its talons on olive trees

like a phoenix that wants to be a dove.