Considering the Extraordinary Lateness of the Hour,
____________________
might it not behoove us to retire, to disappear
into a sanctuary our minds might fabricate
of balsawood and twine, ark of our private covenant, or
transportable temple we’d shove before us into what deserts
of ashes deserts of honey we might find, considering
the noon sky’s deep dusking over these
cherry branches lashed now like a scourge,
antiluxuriations of pink blossoms
scavenged by the wind and left to ride
side-by-side with hailstones
in the latest of this decade’s fifty-year-storms,
would it betray too much to set ourselves loose like them
and lift the barrow handles of the ark
and exile each other into a scabbed land
for more hidden
exposure to our own manna-pours,
together-
left, considering
how few decades
of habitation of this earth we might expected
amid the resistless mutagenic plagues,
hyper-calving of the glacier-walls and quickening
eschatology of twice-burnt dust and lightnings from the mountain-top and Moseses
with faces candescent in this dark
from the forty-day presences
of their unpresentable god,
considering the beaten work of all the smelted
gold idols melted down and drunk, can’t we now
ask to be excused
to set out
toward the cities left in ashes cities
of camouflaged and itinerant
lusted-after angels, given
the sub-
sublimities of the time
why
ought we be cursed again if we,
into the salt pillars of each other’s exhausted minds, upon
a bed of pillows stuffed
plush with all these ashes, minds
tilled together, lay ourselves,
preserved and fallow, to rest?
