I.
Slate capillaries
throb against a wet pearl sky,
A lone crow scoots past some naked elms –
an emissary from St. Thomas Aquinas
to his blood-less first-moving intellect.
Green hedge rows like verdant coffins
glisten beyond drapes of fog-like gauze.
The triangular roofs of country houses
sparkle like trianon diamonds of brick-red tile.
My over-heated room, a gas chamber of wealth.
The travel clock ticks finitudes of the eternal
in this bland spell of bourgeois surfeit.
My fertile wife sleeps in the adjoining room.
II.
Lazarus!
You knew the wealth of truth too well!
The gorged rich man trembles outside
the portals of the divine
as the beggar’s soul feasts at a table
of sublime in a palace beyond time,
his ignored pit of mud
.
III.
No soul escapes my mouth,
hacked by punk-rock devils in glee,
Nor shadow trapped in my corporeality.
The grains of testament,
ground and baked,
the sores cannot heal,
nor the eyes awake.
St. Pere-sous-Vezelay
