Bismillah            will you grant me the valleyed crevice of
something silver and scoured

with sound.
I wander toward guilt, a young traveler           looking for ruins,

loving what I can,
jagged with the narrow edge         of all I do not, prayer

like bees in my mouth.

Allah like tasbihs in my mouth.
How many times have I opened myself up        to God?

The deer have returned from their     rivering, my tongue
is sanded down by the language

of you,          so what is left?

The wind, the wind, the wind. . .          thirty-three times
the bead flicks

like the ki ki ki

of a Northern bird. How it howls          through
my skin          into a landscape of wild hives—

What is left has no holy.             A nameless bone, frayed
and twinning into the moss.

Not unlike undoing the seam           of a wound to find a country,
every du'a a deep cut,          every recitation its blood.

What is left has no Allah beyond the vineyard
of memory—

Again and again, the wind.
Merciful Allah         grant me forgiveness, if anything.