Bona domna,
domna valens,
overflown with liquid silver,
overseen, her silent soul’s bruised contraction.
The promise, not of repeated though temporary
ecstasies, but of a monotony, supplanting all diversity
with a singular sweetness.
Proximate call to dissolution, the unfixing of
imagination’s inner and outer desires, soul’s solitary delight.
Planetary motion of revolutionary, permanently dependent being.
And is there no perfect prayer if the religious
perceives that she is in prayer?
Silent soul and silent God, ‘two doorposts with the great
miracle about to open between them’.
Dousa dona,
bell’amija.
The still moment before the entrance of the lover into
the beloved. To be received, tasted, embraced, enraptured.
Silent soul and silent God,
one attending and one about to speak out of infinite solitude.
Touchstone among the stigmaed many,
the soldered beatitudes on the architrave’s ravaged face.
That, and continuing silence.