Eightfold Chant

Church of broken toasters and singed fuses,

church of the dripping roof and chipped chimney stack,

of the flooded garage and its split door,

gas-hissing pipes and sibilant water heaters,

church of piss-poor light and shaky ladders

where I unchoke windows and dislodge chopsticks

from pipes, smooth curled up wallpaper and key the locks,

fix clocks sticking or ticking with different times,

church where wings of dead flies drift like petals

from cobwebs, ghosts sift through floorboards

and the homeless sleep in compost, steeping like tea bags

pungent from the leaves' damp weight.

Church where I am summoned by the door's clatter of brass

to the brown-toothed vagrant who spreads open

her overcoat; to the chattering man who communes

with pines and brooms the stairs; to the bent, old Japanese woman

who forgets her keys, waits for me to twist the lock free

so she can scrub floors with Murphy wood soap

and a toothbrush, wobble atop a ladder and polish the two-ton bell.

On this path I am my uncle setting cubes of cheese into jaws

of traps, and my grandmother stirring peas into a pan of fried rice,

and my grandfather padding the halls in slippers and gloves,

the cold globes of his breath a string of prayer beads

weaving me, a mixed-blood grandson, into them.

Source: Topaz (Four Way Books, 2013)