The balding plowboy heard the aging prophet
call. Before he reached the end of his row,
he had built an altar-fire of his yoke
and boiled the fat-wrapped thighbones of oxen.

Reading this scene at seventeen, I stepped
off the tractor in search of a master.
Had I finished the passage, I’d have seen
the plowboy stayed long enough to kiss his father.

Instead, I tindered a spark on newsprint facts
and snapped my pencils into kindling.
While the flame took hold of men and their acts,
I washed my hands in a basin of ink, boiling.

I read: from holy flame, the angel drew an ember.
The prophet’s tongue burned yet was not consumed.
Short an angel escort, I bellowed my flames,
pulled my own live coal, named its heat, and plumed
smoke-ringed syllables of tongue, still sizzling;
lips too blistered to kiss my mother.

I chiseled on my eyelids a decalogue
of shalts, honored ancestors, and allegiance
to the restless flagellation of Work.
On the lens of each eye I etched seraphim
seriffed at head and foot with a thousand dotted eyes.

Swinging the centurion’s god-damning hammer
I pinned my god-breathed lines with a priest’s collar,
puncturing my swallow mid Adam’s apple,
then compelled my voice to rasp homilies
like a butcher’s blade scrapes marrow
for meat too meager to feed my people.

Now in the dark world wide I go, a sunless Zedekiah,
numb-tongued, orphaned by my own argot.
Isolәte in a shibboleth of stuttered grief;
to these to whom I should speak, I’m mute
as an ear of wheat. Their voices call, an echo

in the sky, like the glee of geese navigating at night
lost to anyone’s sight, but not to memory.
Their wings taut nearly tip to tip.
Between them, a seat of mercy.