The sky was ablaze like glass in the church;
recumbent on stone floors / we had knocked out
the windows to let in only the blind light,
the blind arches that pointed heavenward, now yawning
narcoleptic houses of God grasping at sky and god
somehow / we captured daylight in our hands / we were
yearning for ourselves again between long hours of waiting
we believed in gods that breathed that great sky, we believed
in the breadth of cosmos more dazzling
than the church doors that we blew asunder
in that latter architecture where we decided the height
& breadth of the pillars in their proportions like
the proportions of man, exhausted & exaggerated,
man exalted, exaudi, exaudi, voca meam quam olim Abrahim
praises to all our lords on high, we sang in drunk
communion hailing, our communion with one another,
all of us there on the stone flags, hands in hands
we beat at the chests of each other, the eyes of each other
(we were just kids beating off to one thing or another)
and it was *** and chaos between those stone walls, it captured
us, bewildered us, those yawning heavens under the church ceiling,
the one that blazed with the dazzling color of windows
covered in dust like our skin the way it crept along the stone
and we craved it and the way that it seemed to creep,
the sky seemed to creep above us, seethed with light
some days we didn’t know which way was light, up
or lower down, it was usually easy to tell after you came
but we exhausted our voices, exaudi exaudi orationem meam
believing that something would hear us—we heard ourselves
more clearly in the throes of ******, nothing was more alive
more human, than anything, than anything that sang like that blazing
sky/ so we tossed ourselves forward into lightward, lightness
dazzling ourselves with light / it was the summer of everything closing /
the bewildering truth of our own god in cells and precious molecules
we made god in the throes of ******, worshipping in the dazzling sky
we had to propel ourselves forward, it was our stunning captivation
with that dazzling maze of flesh on the yearning sky, hands
searching inscrutably for hands, for god in the feverish sky, god
who doesn’t live in the sky, the god who climbs
with us, the god who screams in our ****** with us,
exaudi, exaudi, orationem meam, ad te omnes caro veniet…
