I proselytize
For a new mythology
With a gasp and groan.

People I don't know:
I might crucify myself
For all these strangers.

Inaccessible;
Turn crucible sweet with work
And wake at manger.

Must find the lady,
Cast her down, find Narcissus;
Teach him to atone.

Cain, Prometheus.
Mood colors a mountain day,
Forges with cold hands.

The earth high can see
Serene deaths at silent sea.
All the quiet lands.

I proselytize
For a new mythology
And worship alone.

A pair of eagles connect in the air
in that mysterious way that birds can.
Rats that gave up the sea and the sinking
ships for a soaring finger
with which to scratch the night sky until
the skin breaks.

Here, they retain that tenuous extension,
a spark of the sin,
that ****** aristocracy that exalts in
making masks out of vellum day
and glowering down from box seats at
the beginning of the descent.

Whether in the sea or fallen as a tree,
the sky is memory.

No one bites me quite the way you do
or locks me with that tenderness of fright.
I cannot see the way we fit as one
But I must fall with you to rocky white.