Death and Other Unfamiliar Things.
Image by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash.
DEATH & OTHER UNFAMILIAR THINGS.
A man, once dead, is a musical instrument bereft of songs. A song, when unsung, is a silkworm refusing to spawn. In biology class, the lecturer informs us the mouth develops from a buccopharyngeal membrane. First, a skin. Then, a slit. This, I learn, is the tale of the honeybee whose barbs were caught in the skin of its prey. O Grace. You, mystical hound of teeth—we do not know your dog bite, but we know your bark. Where a hand is offered, a knife is surrendered. In the breaking of bread, the body is desecrated. In the sharing of wine, the blood is polluted. All night and morning, we toil. We endure sombrest weathers like the praying mantis. Through callus and sousing. Our weathering hands erode into grains of memory. Every hour is a flame on a candle whittled down. For the wax is irredeemable. And the irredeemable is atoning—the way the body misremembers by unlearning its wounds. O Monet, there are missing features in that Figure of a Woman that cannot be corrected with the impressions of color nor shadow, like the tilting of the face inside the tilt of the wall art. Out of its recesses, light bursts forth as an outlined thing. Everything here is a sketchbook of the darkness. This omniscient lifeform that goes on eternal. I wonder the beginning of its death, the arrival of pre-existent blackness, or the lateness of its body’s own bioluminescence, spreading as street lights from lamp poles on a cold evening. This city is a destitute place. The southern birds through the Tundra winds have migrated to a better land. The wind that touches the city’s infirmities is empty as the bodies moving through it. Even the pulsating silence of the trees is stifled in braille. I am afraid paper boats floating in the creek look like drowning little boys. Through the woods of my life, where the lumbering must begin, I have lived as a rocky place. Nothing grows here. Time itself is a loop trapped in its stone. Its death is everywhere. Its grave is everywhere. O August, I am a missed arrival. I was gone before I was to come. To a land of lilies where Spring lies naked. I must hurry, for the world must be sequestered from itself on the inescapable day of its devastation. There is a soul within everything. This is our tragedy. This is our paradox. Maybe, our bane is our insufferable joy. I can’t tell otherwise. But I know there is another life inside another book where I am a green-eyed doe, drifting across a lake in the middle of a mountain. I know my death, and it set me free.
Image from Europeana on Unsplash.
TRANSGRESSOR
Forgive me for the sins I have washed away in the brook,
in the bathwater that will not escape me.
I have watched the pond bloom with toxic algae.
I ask, what God can fumigate my decay?
What monsoon can pour her cauldron over my arid lands?
Even breathing has become a brutal play-act.
I am a drowning man, yet I thirst.
I ask, who inflated my lungs with water and called it air?
They say sobriety is a remedy,
the door to my salvation, yet ever useless
as an unlearned lesson.
Do not speak to me of abstinence
if you have not understood the irradiance of lust.
Hidden in the dim light of my room,
I touch myself in worship.
In glossolalia and the religion of hands.
My body opens trepid, blustery, and raging
as the storm before Christ’s halting voice.
I want to be holy
but there is no opposite without God.
The Tempter disguises in many forms,
yet is known by none.
My mind is a temple,
where I have resisted His innominate presence.
I tell Him I no longer taste the salt of repentance.
I pitch Him as a manhole where everything
enters and leaves as a door.
I ask, is this not the beginning of every transgression?
How the snake slithered into Eve
because she was porous.
God, are you here with me, in the drowning,
pushing out the water?
I want to be fulfilled again,
but there are places in the body we only fill
by emptying
Image by Paul Blenkhorn on Unsplash.
SPECIMEN
What to make of a scion-hewed want
grafted into the heartwood of a tree
infertile in the vocation of seed-bearing?
This is the ludicrousness of faith.
How the light enters as a droplet
and leaves as a river.
Beloved, I have been a witness
to the theophany of our birthing.
Imagine a nebulous cloud of fluorescent lights,
a wild constellation in the cosmos,
unstifled and spontaneous.
There is no hyperbole
to the inscrutable measure of our ignorance.
For all belief is obtuse.
And all religion is specimen.
Once, I, too, arrived at the riverbank of doubt
seeking the mollusk shell of evidence.
Because there are no rivers without a shore,
I walked out of the land into the river
with feet yoked as antlers
upon its silver surface.
It is true, no one knows the road
that leads to God.
All pave their paths in the skin
of a familiar, rescinding light.
Because it is more difficult to doubt,
than to believe.