Nimbuses
A
And the lion will lie with the lamb and the wolf lick the fur of the caribou, calmly, and food chains cease their rattling, all beastly tongues being salted with the taste of You,
at that time, fire engines shall careen around the city just to feel the shrill abundance of their wailing and smile again, arriving always at another scene aflame with blazons of Your Name
angels shall play as anchormen and weatherwomen, grazing their hands across the huge green screens of one another’s bodies
and my prayers will be less and less like statements, abandoning accusative, adverbial, and all
alleluias stalled at ahhh
as my desires reel their hooked lines in at last, grinning at the lures’ bright emptiness and watch each body swimming back away into its depths, uncaught
as I bend down to pry apart my rippling face, diving through azure waterskin into
an ordinary room in which my wife and children have composed actual life, at home more than reflection’s artificial heavens
all things shall be arranged in their usual places, but without atrophy of gesture (a funnel as a trumpet a prayer rope as an abacus)
alive as eons, I will lie awake as the benighted room awaits each perfect second in suspense
and the cells will be opened and I will enter their gates with thanksgiving
B
C
E
“Retell legends,” ebb the embers . Ye, edgeless Essence beget the depthless present tense.
Excerpted newsreel feeds: Eve errs, etc… Serpent repents. The expected sentence reversed.
Hellbent, resplendent, we veer between extremes⇀never rested, we seek new selves. Keened.
There there, levees; strewn perplexed where shelter seeps. Where tempest extends, recedes, recedes.
Elements render them defenseless: speech freezes, nerves tremble,
vessels wreck. Flesh bleeds elements.
Speech fetters, verse tethers, yet we seek Thee trenched there, seeded between letters.
Ye rest, pretend, engender spheres, bejewel deserts, beget the breeze-sketched trees. Preserve them.
We beseech Thee, Nether-Nested: dwell deep here delve green between the temples
Be present. Be here. Be dented where we met. Be felt there yet.
G
Gorged by grace, I gurgle supplications.
Give me etcetera. Give me patience. Give me the holy ghosts I have resigned, gathering facts to fill my growling mind.
Gaze me naked. Let me become gourmand of groin and gristle. Let my tongue graze daily sweat from love’s gooseflesh; glutted with hunger nonetheless.
God, nothing gives me pause; not gulps of cigarette, not shopping malls, not gospel truth, not pain.
Grease the clock’s gears, rewind again: grow me a garden where all things recede, my own globed ripeness turning gaunt with want.
Gird me with distance, a pen to grave these fevered glyphs on garlic paper, gilt with the pungent gift it guards yet cannot ever grasp.
God of the gaps, You peel my meanings back.
I
K
M
O
Q
S
U
W
What do you want with me? Why give me a mind, a welter of wings that beat each other weak with wanderlust?
When I was young, I fashioned sprawling walls with Legos. Nostalgia, meanwhile, wrapt me in its bounds. I waited for the losses waiting would create.
Why waken those wondrous worlds in me, only to wag Your finger warning: “Watch and wait” while hope wrings wrinkles in my face?
What good’s my wondering now? WHERE WHEN WHO HOW WHY WHAT: a compass rose whithering at the window ledge.
With my bow and my quiver I aim at You.
Words, these words, are a wilderness of want where I am blown toward some vanishing point without ever arriving; where Your heady weather wields me, whittled whole.
While thoughts quake my body’s scaffolding, worlds go on—snow thaws, weeds squeeze through, flowers hoist their sweetness up without knowing how.
We writhe in one another’s waves; whorled in their turbulence, cleansed. The Question washed within the never of its quest. The Answer widening its wake till waning
water cannot bear its trace: wending on, inspired with wind the Question makes.
Y
○
“‘…ma tu perche vai?’… ‘per tornar altra volta la dov’io son, fo io questo vïaggio” (Purgatorio 2.90)
[“Why are you on this way? So that I may return where I am.”]
My soul has leeched into my skin. Raw, haunted. Prayers are like this, a cloud of breath on an icon’s varnish.
On a good day, my thoughts rest on the grass like the shadows of grass, blade by blade by blade.
I am trying to understand — in the most basic sense: to be beneath, perhaps, or even to be with
To run a hand along the branching walls of ancient cities as a way to know that I am
To mouth, like wind across doorways, voluble syllables
Not to be bewitched by thoughts
To handle stones: earth’s braille that scrapes my fingerprints, swallows touch into rough sense
In an image blacked by candle smoke, You press one finger to another finger.
Some nights the child me would pinch another smaller me, another room, and so on: symbols pressed breathless.
The storied worlds have looked their sights away. The only faith I still attempt —
Finger pointing to finger. The touch of something touched touching back.
Bless.