The first thing he does.
He lets down my hair,
long neurons shiver, and the violin's
fascination couples to the bow,
silver pleading to my fingertips, a refrain,
the smaller portion of infinity…  

The heavy book presses upon the table,
open to Abraham, where God dwells in unnumbered stars like glass houses, and a charlatan speaks accidentally as a prophet,
as accidentally as I touch his hand.

We stay up too late, and the blue spark
he seeks is hidden, eyes in the lamp-dark, my haphazard wick and oil left untended.
He does not return my gaze.

Instead, he weeps at the tomb as the stone rolls away
from the fading mitigations of the holy ghost’s bed.

The first thing he does…*
In the pre-life world, a veil.
In the veil, a forgetting.
In the forgetting, a footprint…

He undoes the cascade, my barette,
for the same reason I read the book:
to remember from a distance what is here.