1.
The priest read from the prophet Isaiah:
a planta pedis
usque ad uerticem
non erat in eis
sanitas, doggedly his eyes followed the low ordering of the high words without deviation, nor settled once on those the passage signified.
The words thundered through him. His voice never strayed above a murmur.
2.
Narrow and hard, the bed the crucified dancer writhed upon.
Wormed at the zenith of the night, his skin was saffron, maggots filled his mouth, rice wine beading its vinegar burn.
3.
The ravaged walls of the nymphaeum housed her moldering father. Held down as though by lust, in massive arms of stone.
(Among the imagines clypeatae she favored her grandfather, his eyes warning of something near, perception clear that saw the world in darkness.)
She brought herself in predatory shadows to her father’s bed, the one flambeau in all that dark place the fire of their silent couplings, for he rode her as though blind, darkness curtaining their eyes.
4.
The bride proposes a winter lesson. At sunrise rosary she takes an ascetic’s meal: bright oil and water, garnished with a sprig of melancholia.
She hears the steward’s sullen prayers, though not his lecherous meditation on blood.
Suspect, she mates with barren air, autumn turning to sleep, sleep turning to cold.
Stone bowels, cathedral of cruel winds hides her. Orthodox incense, unorthodox prayer, she crosses the threshold into a winter of stone.
5.
Huntress after cherubic perfumed boys, soiled pallets in draughty halls.
In her mind the turning wheel, the roulette of beast and beast disputing the trace of the hind.
In a garden of stone day breaks.
6.
Anselm howling down the sun’s bright choir, light borne down the garden, a flurry of white moths carried away on the breeze.
Anselm’s cry, spilt like naptha on the mutinous water.
7.
To a strange garden for courtship.
On baby’s brow, oil and water.
Sweet victim of considerations.
The garden’s landmarks now faintly remembered, shadows mown beneath an army of gardeners, their clippers in restless whisper.
8.
As though infected by the unformed prayer, the dancer descended his cross to tongue her, employing his wooden hands to damn.
Thirsting for venereal brine the proud stars had sunk, inward to a flamesnuff of stress, an ache in Palestine, in Passchendaele.
9.
Nymphaeum’s ravaged walls housed the moldering of an abandoned patria. Eyes and counterfeit erections among the imagines clypeatae.
Weather, immobility, the tortured, antique symbology of sex.
But seed of word to speak glass or crystal heirloom, a hand marginal to the heart and its sleeping den, territorial, bold as a bride’s skirt, spread wide in surrender.
10.
Behind stout walls the bride attends dawn’s burning clouds.
And had the Florentine’s gift been hers, who might she have thrust in Hell?
The dish, unwashed, is pedestaled.