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Passage-born

Late praise, scraped out from glacier’s stone, pained ocean liner notes I’ve untethered from their host: San Phillipe de Jesus, by passage born of cornhusk and serpent’s spite, dancing icthyphallic on seas coiling soft through swan’s legs.

Martyred under pacific, asterisked sky: last night’s bones and scales ruined, decorating fine porcelain.  Mother did you know him, mother did you taunt him in the shattered ether, stretching your verse from the Ten Directions to dry in arid memory?

Two seasons flayed on the volcanic slope like your children carried in exile.  When the forty-four windows in our house seizured, and nearly cracked, I thought I saw you smother your smile; the rushing darkness of your childhood geography, molten and black, parted our eyes.  You arranged for me a harmony of earthquakes, my only silent mind under your solar eclipse, my inheritance of earthly sympathy.  And you arranged for our checkered mongrel an altar when she died, and probably also the starving dogs we together mourned in the streets of Cuernavaca.

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