soul, paraphrased
I have forgotten what I wanted to say—
*
prayer’s tarnished
chalice couldn’t hold
night’s
spill, sky:
*
(not that sorry was
red and sorrow, blue)
*
—but I have forgotten what I wanted to say
something understood—
*
the waterwheel is still
waiting for river’s song:
after fireweed blighted the wheat
field long fallow, whisper
sunrise, touch me:
tendril, leaf be green:
there are four angels standing at the four corners of the earth
sometimes our hearts are animals
I cradled the cinders
by the waters of Big Joshua Creek
both hands, barely alight, what had
been my mind: I’d heard
he was one of those boys
who air out their insides on windowsills
*
it had something to do with religion
every full moon, a choir of elderly monks
singing tone-deaf liturgies for each hour
for the virgin hair daily set on fire
inside the almost-ivory chapel,
my ribs an empty sparrow’s cage
“had you not followed the vatic
*
your face,” he’d said, “would have been
of brilliant countenance”: lithographic
landscape beyond the forgotten
ocean of the innermost ear
where one boy, with a wolf for a heart, wants
to eat the songbird nesting inside the other
it had something to do with religion
*
when I tried to tell you every day’s a seraph’s four faces watching over
boy/bird wolf/boy
you brought me the blessed earthenware
cup of winter spiked with nettles & nard
& not even the star dying in my mouth could
dull the bright draught’s ashen rime
every time you wish the sky was something happening to your heart
as if it had something to do with
religion: spirit in the wheel
of cattle egrets spun
out of the scorched field
lonely for livestock, again alfalfa
eyes yet asleep,
moon become saltpan &
as if the gloaming welled out of
hallowed ground I will not let thee go
Jacob’s pillow except thou
white feather ladder bless me