Steel Belly of God
Muscle planted senses that grew to calluses and hard eyes
in the time when ancients rode God from town to town.
They learned laws of the covenant in numbers and lines,
spoke God’s direction where the southern crosses the yellow dog
so many times they leaped intervals of articulate vibration.
Dance halls were sweet with sweat at play,
bright with limbs at architect’s angles,
and dizzy with skirts set to painter’s circles.
Ancients turned their calling of muscle to air
and blew on the bandstand, whether well or struggling,
always for good.
For who can tell what heart will be blessed
among people of taut ears and shaking bodies?
It releases to humming night
its curse of years spent hoping
aged hand of flatted constructs will rest
beneath jagged moan of prophecy.
And again it releases to humming night
its demand for answer to fill the void question leaves.
But ancients of God packed their dreams with his demand.
They slept on his rocking floor,
stayed warily inside his treacherous door
and remembered from the dark of his steel belly
the day that had marked them from ruin.
They had fled among roads and west, cast to death,
leaving their own souls by the highway in the ground.
Then the shadow of God passed o’re them,
and he moaned like unto one dead himself.
Calling from the viscera of his hallowed music,
he cursed them to bless and struck them to heal,
for he said, You do not see the tracks
that cross from this time to the next
when your sweat will long since have vanished in vapor
and your bones crumbled in the place where I hold you.
But your breath will remain full and still, preserved and animate.
Though web and wire seek to supplant me,
I will raise me you as ghosts within the digits
to be again my call to the resonant and the broken.
For who can tell what heart I will bless
from distant moments of your stepping to the dawn
of another labored town heavy under a slab of wanting?
And ancients of God were like babies in a casket
peering half-eyed into darkness, worlds untold just out of reach.
