What Is Sacred

I have no idea what priests dream of on Christmas Eve, what prayer a crippled dog might whine before the shotgun. I have no more sense of what is sacred than a monk might have, sweeping the temple floor, slow gestures of honor to the left, the right. Maybe the leaf of grass tells us what is worthwhile. Maybe it tells us nothing. Perhaps a sacred moment is a photograph you look at over and over again, the one of you and her, hands lightly clasped like you did before prayer became necessary, the one with the sinking cathedral in Mexico City rising up behind you and a limping man frozen in time to the right of you, the moment when she touched your bare arm for the first time, her fingers like cool flashes of heaven.