Dear Father I erred
I left my body to look for you
(its image nestles in the center of a wide valley
in perfect isolation wild as Eden)
One became many: spirits in presence
yes workers and no workers up on the tops
of the hills in striped overalls
toy capes puffing
and blue veils as yet unrealized in the sky
I made myself homeless
on purpose for you shinnying up the silence
murky hand-pulls
Gray the first color
many textured clay beneath my feet
my face shining up I lost faith but once
(theology)
She said I said why
fear there’s nothing to it
at any minute
a stepping out of and into
no columns no firmament
Most of each thing
is whole but contingent
on something about
the nearest one to it
(human interference)
Ringing bells in winter churches
while vast clouds gray over
a kindness formerly unmirrored
on your face
The fine line to every sense (it ends)
The stranger kin to the divine (sometimes)
Confused but moving
the only stranger I know
has a bed a blanket
a heartfullness famous
for hypocrisy
When she’s not trusting anyone
she leans her crown
upon her hand
snowslop all the way to the grating
before lying down
in a little block of childhood
(one hour for the whole of life)
and her book to record it
Was the chasm between her mind
and things
constituted by the intellect’s catalogue
or by the presence of senses
(around her face
objects fall into special functions
tangled loops against concrete walls
moonish nuclear fission capped with molten gold)
or by a sticky sub-atomic soul
See how this being at the neck and bowel
gives the head and groin a taste of hell
that seeps throughout some nervous systems
all senses battered and inflamed
where the soul drinks disabled
and attacks only a she a she can see
who smiles in dreams between clenched hands
sobbing from wanting to win her pity
her in the born-hating
thing she finds there living
