Atop the Church of my father’s town — whose worship might have denominated his own had he stayed to be born unconverted, baptized in the worn lap of a spouting gargoyle idol — there’s a crucifix, a cross holy and sacred, and yet so much smaller than the halfmooned, bit crescent nail of my forefinger: a mere crux ordinaria as it’s called Latinwise, as if it’s a species of sentient life, and so cycled mundanely as both predatory and prey — one of the stilled and yet fearsome, toothy mutant dominion perched to threaten, and yet precariously, on its claws at a cornice; this figure promoted supernaturally through the ranks of the demons, risen to lord it above its more featured fellows invested with lesser symbol and wings to top the highest reach of this Cathedral, let’s say it is, there atop the tallest of the innominate, decardinaled steeples as if a rood rod installed to conduct any wrath that might call. Here I’m pregnant with milk in white air, with this cross burying itself into the eye of my navel, gouging spinedeep, its crossed arm barring me, nailing itself into me as if forbidding, in an intervention nothing short of superfluous, and divinely dismaying: refusing me a world I’ve already forsaken — a father’s domain to which I don’t dare tempt return, even prodigally, even if Heavenly proven, made then remade…I belch a brilliant millions of stars, and then — hisssssss…it’s my voice you’re hearing on the wind, of the wind, exploded to weather, to pieces of pieces, my immensity popped, scattering shards; usurpers to shove their ways through my tatters, remains, these patches, those righteous splinters of flesh and boneslivers, badges of me, and rainbows’bands, remnants never to be put back together, never to be revesseled, spitstuck, or tikkuned with whose love, tell me how on a gust — never to be assimilated again into any becoming anew, another In the beginning again, yet another arrival for seating whether at table, in pew…perfection’s hope lost to a lateness, a gap yawning lag, a void purely defiled, immaculate as immaculately unclean, and so, never to heal: the wound wound between clockhands — below, and clasped still — which distance maintained is all that sustains.
As shards of me fall from the sky as if shards of the sky — this weathering of me through the world.
All that remains of me are two horns, here in a Square, having lately grown from my head, then shed, scattered atop the earth, tipped and tumbled, and blown through by wind — Hear O Israelien, the hollowness of their howl…
Mere artifacts, for the museum we know as the future.
One day last, or so it’s been said, they’ll be found, on which end they’ll be sounded with lip and with lung: their blast to bloom up from the fundament, through a cadence toned to the heavens, reflectively pitched low to the grave…an opening, this cadence existing only between pitches, within them, this the moment of every conversion, the last — when air becomes sound, the assimilation of breath into call…a life, mouthforced into summons: a perfect interval, this high note rising ever further to kiss at the face of the void, resolving into a horizon on which the world will rest its revolutions, soon, in our time. And listen — this will be the death of both silence and Babel, of question and answer, all reborn as a freeing of air.
