Palm Sunday
What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?
— Mark 8:36
The premise will not hold. Listen.
This tongue around this slope
of words, our fixed hallucinations
are a thick, unsound abiding
in the six walls of our God. What I mean
is that we dangle from the bones of prophets,
maps, of Galilee. The teeth that sank
into our flesh now have no mouths.
All the ears that wouldn’t
hear, all the eyes that wouldn’t
see: they drank in their unknowing
like the basin of the deep.
But this is our forfeiture; this, here:
This ear against the latticework, this
breath against the cheek,
these knees locked at the altar.
A palm leaf waving meekly
in the breeze. An empty street.
***
Born Again
How the ground will darken, doused
with water breaking over all of us, bursting
round us, launching all this red pulp
into being!
Does not the womb we love
mean only pushing out, disjunction?
What emerges is a purging
of the thing that eats one whole.
So shall we grow up to be gods? or christs? or only humans
solid and adapted? Will you wean us,
worming us into some insubstantial mass,
and will you leave us,
and believe us when we say we’ll never chew
at the damp edges of your wounds, or that
we’ll never wish us back
up in the warm dark thing you were
when you were Hovering only, Wordless,
when the darks and deeps were multiplying,
waiting to be born?
