Undersong
intel/cromlech, arch & splay
five-finger’d, the soul
pours as thrum
anoint/bequest, earth’s
certitude
blooded in Name, touch
to affliction, (—gyre)
dim quern of the body
prelates a grain lichen
can’t safely suffer,
unislanded as is all flesh
absent God we are
“meat with a dream,”
I told my friend stranded
in Cairo, she
was reading Luther
something light fled,
a threshing-verb
rose-mother-perfect
& fawn-kingdom
lust’s percussive temblor
in the evergreens
baptize & exhale
I have wanted both more
& less (than this)
in the midpoint of a pure
Sound in the midpoint
of a clean encumbrance
smallest-gland
I am laced (& unlaced)
purpose me O you
red wound
ablaze with Nation,
a meadow rises
into the body’s rest
as one furling lung
cleft of thread’s mosque
or compound fracture,
the heart veers
pleaward, a green music
a slivering tightness
in the azure sheath-gait,
supernatant
(the body’s prescient quoit)
proprioception hesitates
(cavitates), filtering
body from not-body
a potable physick
placed on repeat
the forest remembers
its first self Marry me
cries the cruciform flame
I would bring two separate
lives to this cairn-
duct, enhespering
vale-of-choice
honey’s impact limns
this saline oculus
day’s scab, gently smoldering
Christ in the standing-place
[see: rest (the idea of)]
theater-firmament
discrete
(“meat with a dream”)
hive-chancel
-in-waiting (-O)
oh life I could have
(wanted) waking now
from its winter sleep
into beauty’s
hearth, dawn’s un-
remaindered semaphore
church-bled prayerlight
set within a resin-
mesh, memory’s clerestory
ash-man, waste-kingdom
phosphorescence, vs.
inflorescence
(—planish this memory)
love’s fire-dream
within myth (lily-lift,
-clef)
or vertical flesh system
trumpeting blade
in my shining-places
you may reach out
& touch it, love’s
voiled spectrum, it is not
a skin (tho’ touchable)
my sly & umbral holt
burrs this sky-leat
the blind walk, the deaf see
heal this solecism
pilgrim me, temple
of Christ’s red amplitude
piercing the glen
a thousand glass eyes
cast lesionward
or bells miscegenate
(we touch
with our twin drums)
haptic centrifuge
punched from dew’s bone
say meat blossoms
into some other
dream, say we are present
(purled moon of thrust
unblemishing)
suckle me, all flying things
brew your high nectars
above my caul
’s insensate chemistry
baptismal trump,
deft chi-rho inscribed
against
wheat’s haptic fragment
pocks this circumflex, e.g.
repentance
is like this, a broken window
a burning milk
the slow, steady pulse
of breath, its wretched
field your vegetable heat
louvers, blots
the green wound
language’s ghost
among almost everything,
sweat’s ash & scour
the busy grave
gilds its vapors, the broad-
spread shade hums
eye-herding, unshepherding
I would tattoo this
plenty house
as one among flesh
a hem, a cup, a sleeping lamp
breath’s prong
or waking swan
its small blue dispersal
(as from some evening bell
level, view / sheep (true)
