GOLDEN VESPID

The slow-worm that leg-less lizard flows along the entryway stairs

calm and majestic as an anaconda, differing only in size.

The sky is cloud-covered but the sun presses through. Such is the day.

This morning my love drove the evil spirits away.

As when you throw open the door to a dark storeroom in the south

and light rushes in

and cockroaches dart swiftly swiftly out to the corners and up the walls

and are gone—you both saw and didn’t see them—

so her nakedness got the demons to flee.

As if they never existed.

But they’ll come back.

With a thousand hands making bad connections in the nerves’ oldfangled switchboard.

It’s July fifth. The lupines are stretching up as if they wanted a view of the sea.

We’re in the church of keeping-silent, in a letter-less piousness.

As if the implacable patriarchs’ faces didn’t exist

and God’s name wasn’t misspelled in stone.

I watched a fundamentalist TV-preacher who gathered crowds with money.

But by then he was weak and needed the support of a bodyguard,

a well-tailored young man with a smile that fit tight as a muzzle.

A smile that suffocated a scream.

The scream of a child left behind in a hospital bed when his parents go home.

The divine brushes up against a person and lights a flame

but then draws back.

Why?

The flame attracts shadows, they fly rustling in and merge with the flame,

which rises and blackens. And the smoke spreads out black and strangling.

In the end only the black smoke, in the end only the pious executioner.

The pious executioner leans forward

over the market square and crowd that form a grainy mirror

in which he can see himself.

The biggest fanatic is the biggest doubter. But he doesn’t know this.

He is a pact between two

where the one should be visible a hundred percent and the other invisible.

How I loathe that expression “a hundred percent!”

Those who can’t reside anywhere other than their own facade

those who are never absent-minded

those who never open the wrong door and catch a glimpse of The Unidentified One—

walk past them!

It’s July fifth. The sky is cloud-covered but the sun presses through.

The slow-worm flows along the entryway stairs, calm and majestic as an anaconda.

The slow-worm as if the establishment didn’t exist.

The golden vespid as if idolatry didn’t exist.

The lupines as if “a hundred percent” didn’t exist.

I know the depths where one is both prisoner and ruler, like Persephone.

Often I lay in the stiff grass down there

and watched the earth vault over me.

The vault of Earth.

Often, it was half my life.

But today my gaze has left me.

My blindness has gone away.

The dark bat has flown from my face and scissors around in the summer’s light space.