Picking Up Shiny Things

communion

What of our offerings, the beautiful,
and the profane? We come together
at this altar, this place of desire
and peril, seeking, saving, holding
dear the wounds and roses we have gathered.

There are prayers for illumination,
another for the falling of a veil.
We remember a soft inflection
that brings a river of regret,
a certain shade of blue, a cornflower

glance across an infinite prairie.
We bear them up, our own relics,
the mundane, the nearly grand,
the hoped for, the abandoned.
These are our moments, pale petals

of open flesh we tender over
fraught waters. Often it is a cast
of light or a scent of limes and tallow
that brings us to our knees, some snare
that falls into our path and conjures

an hour when we rested in the hand
of mercy. There now, we find a way
to sleep and dream these things,
that we might breathe and endure
in this thin and unforgiving air.