by
Malachi Black


I have carried in my coat, black wet
with rain. I stand. I clear my throat.

My coat drips. The carved door closes
on its slow brass hinge. City noises—

car horns, bicycle bells, the respiration
truck engines, the whimpering

steel in midtown taxi brakes—bend
in through the doorjamb with the wind

then drop away. The door shuts plumb: it seals
the world out like a coffin lid. A chill,

dampened and dense with the spent breath
of old Hail Marys, lifts from the smoothed

stone of the nave. I am here to pay
my own respects, but I will wait:

my eyes must grow accustomed
to church light, watery and dim.

I step in. Dark forms hunch forward
in the pews. Whispering, their heads

are bowed, their mouths pressed
to the hollows of clasped hands.

High overhead, a gathering of shades
glows in stained glass: the resurrected

mingle with the dead and martyred
in panes of blue, green, yellow, red.

Beneath them lies the golden holy
altar, holding its silence like a bell,

and there, brightly skeletal beside it,
the ***** pipes: cold, chrome, quiet

but alive with a vibration tolling
out from the incarnate

source of holy sound. I turn, shivering
back into my coat. The vaulted ceiling

bends above me like an ear. It waits:
I hold my tongue. My body is my prayer.