For J.B. Harlan
1
My love, is it the devil or the saints
that lead you back into your faith
when, all along, the reason
why you came was your
mute and blazing
craving for forgiveness —
a love of confession —
when we come from
sin in the first place
(and have run that race
to emerge golden,
glorious, victorious)?
At least for now,
you carry your religion
less like a blanket
and more like a silenced gun.
2
I want to say I do not wonder if
you miss me. I want to say I’ve lost
track of the days since we last spoke,
since I felt your rough hands land
on my back as your fingers would find
lines of divine electricity alive in my spine.
I want to say I do not recall how many
weeks have passed since you last
kissed me. I want to ignore the time
that’s poured through my front door;
how many shoes in the hall, discarded,
or how many men; how many times
I’ve wished it was you, instead.
I don’t know, anymore, the names of
stars that slip by like good wine, the nights
gone since either of us called you mine.
I want to say that there is no love
for you left in either my heart or my
head, but we both know I’d be lying.
I want to say I could not place your
taste if I tried, but I dine on reveries
of you still by my side.
3
[I am not sure, cannot be sure:
do you still love me anymore?]
You leave me shipwrecked
on honey-dewed honeymoon shores
to build a boat of pictures
I’ve always seen before,
bittersweet, moaning:
“I still adore you, honey;
don’t forget the second door:
newly expectant of its own
closing, newly driven
towards exploding. Without
your bones to warm this form,
I am pale and poor and cold.”
4
I am brushing my moving
lips, currant-red, against
the leaden pages of scripture.
I am yearning for your flesh
instead. I long to be pure.
I lay my coarse belief to bed.
I am led by impassioned
communions. You know how
well my hymns can soothe.
I let their rhythms summon you.
I invoke Thee,
Spirit,
Love,
Truth;
I invoke Thee,
Mistress and Master,
Father and Mother.
I invoke Thee,
Muse.
5
Part of our glory
always rested in ceremony.
6
Honey, does she know
all the things you told me?
Has she heard all
your golden stories?
[ I sip Water
and spit Ore. ]
Perhaps I thought you’d never
find our love a bore. Perhaps
it caught the charcoal, the tinder,
the kindling strewn about my soul,
then coaxed a bonfire from my core.
Maybe I still hear the cinders spark
and pop. Maybe I wish I could stop
seeing the sick replaying of
that perfect, silly, awful evening
when you stopped speaking
only to drop to one knee —
on piebald grass beneath some
gangly churchyard tree — in
sweating cobblestone streets — and more! —
upon my filthy townhouse floor —
to drop to one knee
and ask if you could
marry me —
and I said yes,
but I am weeping.
7
Maybe that’s where I
stored up my belief
and am now left with
only sacrificial meaning.
8
These days,
when I pray,
I wonder if anyone
hears me. I wonder
if anything’s still
listening.
I’ve learned to create
my own plagues.
9
Your quiet is hounding
me. Haunted, I scream:
“It is you, honey, it is you
and not your phantom
that I need.”
Beside you,
I found my
Holy City.
In me
once beat
a trinity.