Ancient rain still wreathes your hair, lingers,
unwilling to assume the mantle of air. I am flame,
I am July, ascending into strange worship.
Be careful even as you read this, your eye vulnerable
in the desert ruin of this page, each word entwined
with the quiet, holy book-scent.

N, was this an invitation to you? Bathed in the scent
of mint from soccer field gardens that lingers
despite twenty years of memorial rust, entwining
with your dark hair that flashes guttering flame.
Mint and hair our prophesy, but still vulnerable,
liable to dissolve. Let us by reading worship

the old poets; Lorca our hymnal. We’ll worship
as fervent heathens until no mint, no hair, no scent
of books can stop this ribbon river moment, invulnerable.
Old orbits decay invisibly but still we linger
in our mansions of hurt histories, cored by the flames.
I am reduced by degrees to a shadow, entwined

with a false animal made for the world, entwined
the way the barb is with the wire. Worship
is fading smoke crying nostalgically for flame,
is the intoxicating almond whose scent
bears the mystery of cyanide. Come, N, linger
in my world with me, so vain and vulnerable.

Savonarola burned away the vanities – wooden and vulnerable,
the crooked dice screamed. Playing cards entwined
with the illustrated pages of risqué books, a perverse worship,
a sacrifice that rose in pornographic ash and lingered
in the branches of midnight above charcoal Florence until the scent
collapsed soft as a sigh back into moraled flames.

N, perhaps you are the consuming flame
in this story. Am I your violin, varnish melting, vulnerable?
Or am I Savonarola, lighting the first match, the telltale scent
of match heads gambling in the breeze? We are entwined
in a new history. Come read with me. Worship
the blind hills of the sea. Their melancholy lingers.