Stained Glass
Threnody of unbaffled fire,
come play with us.
Bring your widow’s mite,
your depilatory of dreams.
Mercy insists divine
love has a color:
light shines through it that
the eye might remember.
The flickering arcana
of America’s cloth heart
emit their paleolithic
cartographies, its querulous
musk. I want to wear
you—your commensal
banquet, your claustro-
phobic pietà—as a fourth
skin, one science
won’t be engraving
with its raw helical arks.
What far-flung
clavicle in belief’s body
might, being struck, resign
itself to pure wonder,
at least for a little while—
inscribe this crude
bone of my forefathers
with something more than
violence, passports
glazed in flame & numinous
for as long as I remain
sitting here, watching
gently in lightning’s thrall.
