Reading Saint John of the Cross

How many miles to the border

where all the sky there is

exists for the soul alone?

Where the only breathers

breathing are constructed

from some new electricity

and the flowers are made

indestructible, and messages

from the dead arrive like calm

white birds with a gift?

One more night of spiritual

ice and we might all become

birds, green birds frozen

on a black winter branch.

There is a drumming in the shadows

under leaves: a million eight-eyed

spiders on the march.

The buckeyes beat themselves

half to death against

some lit-from-within screen.