Coup-de-grâce

Coup-de-grâce

1. Saint Paul

granite graceful gift
august kept me going
must drenched my eyesockets
and I would have my blood
melt coldly
into light.

the time it took for me to harden
broke the seal. the souls I take
leave quietly their blood.

my guise is that of treason proud
I am the dawn I am the blind that see
my light my chosen sight melts coldly.


2. Apotheosis of Julian the Apostate

I touch your spine of ivory to become
totem I carve on myrrh my fingernails to

become temple I push you through gold-leafed papyri
coating beast-blue blood and a relic-branch of the first lit tree

in creation I made things both from hewn-rock
and milk rained on daisies growing on marble

to become oracle I murmured glyphed fires to marauders
and made them speechless vases overflowing with purple smoke

from the dome above an obelisk's tip I forced my own leap
upon the open-mouths and thunderbolt ambrosia to become


2. Elegy of Julian the Apostate

down under to find you buried all-
god singing lowering arpeggi meeting
none at all? I say a name just to say
the other. none at all inside the chamber of my skull.
skylight of names, o Sun, great eastern prince,
I stop the world in stone.


3. Theodosius the Great

Your hand is a block of granite. And mine?
The sun's face. Smoke from Delos. Greece
is distant. And taking back Jerusalem
like seeing the Light locked in the stone.


(2009)