A Hymn

I traveled to the page where scripture meets fiction.

The paper slept but the night in me woke up.

Black letters were now alive

and collectible in a material crawl.

I could not decipher their intentions anymore.

To what end did their shapes come forth?

To seduce or speak truth?

While birds swept over the water

like pot-bellied angels

beautiful bells rang to assist the hoist.

Up they went to slake their thirst,

drinking from the mist

for the sound of bells seemed to free

as well as hold them.

Then down to scavenge the surf

and eat the innocent.

“I love God and the ferry too,” wrote Kerouac.

Only that which exists can be spoken of.

I wonder, will our imagination

remain a temple burning with candles

against all odds?

Behind a nipple and a bone?

The simplest of glands laid in a circle

around skin and liquid

that stirs up imagery

winged and prismed, as if blood

were a wine inducing visions

Some people cry when the characters die.

Then they kill themselves offstage, away from the pages

that they are turning in the night.

Some people sacrifice themselves on a whim

and regret it later on paper.

Now I see you in the window.

Are you in the book I was looking for?

The one who traveled back to the happy days

when she could jump on a moving bus

and swing in the open air

clutching a worn novel in her purse . . . ?

A curtain, a knife, adoring eyes?

I watched the children running

and turned to Alyosha for a blessing.

He was sunk in the morass

of rural life

I like to sit with him in the grass.

Then we see the same thing at the same time,

and are one mind.

We two masses, one a book, one a hand.

When Alyosha spoke to the boys at the end

I anticipated their next question and his answer

For they formed a single gesture

of kindness.

“Will we?” “We will.”

It seemed evil to read about people

we would never meet.

We tested their fortitude as if in sleep.

They generally failed the challenge

being strangers in a strange brain.

They were baffled by the tools

handed to them and by the traffic’s direction.

Frankly in a dream or story,

the goal is absolutely hidden

from the one to whom it matters.

Eons of lily-building

emerged in that one flower.

Eons, eons. Pins

and wool, thread and needle,

all material

made of itself and circumstance.

It was a terrible century:

consisting of blasted

oil refineries and stuck ducks,

fish with their lips sealed by plastic

and tar in the hair of cooks.

Filth had penetrated the vents.

Institutions moan.

Balls of used cotton

from the hospital dumpster, redden.

Yawning on obsolescence

the computer wonders

who punched in such poor grammar.

First-padded virgins

graduate to this suffering drama

all by her-selves.

Who once were cells.

History is more than just another surmising

grandmother at a window

or a reminiscence twisted in the scrim of translation.

Some long-ago light is pulsating in a trout’s heart

on a laboratory dish.

That light has entered all the holes,

no matter how small, because it is the light that wants to live.

Still waiting for you my sunshine

of justice and mercy.

If west is east of Moscow,

depending where you’re going

then will you ever find me

coming from a northerly direction?

Are you even looking at the earth?

Remember the map is flat but everything else is not.

Is the newest child the oldest body in creation?

Does he carry more information than his mother?

Does her mother, his grandmother, do I seem redundant

by having arrived with less, though first?

Is that why I read at night with my lips compressed?

The fact is, I never knew if anyone felt me

the way Nijinsky knew how to feel.

Or Nastasya. Nothing could shock that woman

who had done so much wrong.

As if trained in a theater, multiple personalities

streamed from her tongue.

This made her an exemplar for our time.

She knew how others felt and became each one,

forgetting who she was before.

I remember her as a child.

Her skirt got tangled up

in a thorn bush when she watched the sky.

Shaking herself free,

she had to see the spiders, ants and dirt

around her skirt,

It was like peering into her own body

and she screamed in horror.

Later, consolation

would be extended by a man dark and handsome:

It came with his semen

(when she wanted hibernation).

She didn’t commit suicide this time, but ran

down Nevsky Prospekt as it began to rain,

and paused to lift her umbrella.

For this moment

we were in our soul a child

rushing home to granny five floors up.

I dropped the book, wept and went to the movies.

It is here where I can forgive someone for his crime.

Poisoning babies for profit. Harry Lime.

I can actually forgive it when he is crawling in shit.

Otherwise we will stand on the ferris wheel together forever

stuck in the fog and iron.

I just a witness to his ironic story

He will be a mix between Paul Celan and Oscar Levant

when we are at our happiest

and no forgiveness is asked.

Neurotic, pale, and drawn to the canals,

we will lean over the embankment like sister and brother

who are tempted to be actors.

It is here that his shoes and cat

will converge in the dark. Like fish in a secular city

flipping through sewers for a flash of Christ.