For Chris Agee
1. As the Gods Who All Things Know
You would save the harrowed from their foregone fall,
as though a wish could mend a broken seal,
the numb wound sharpen its nerve again, to heal
clean back to its raw complaint. The angel
at the gate beyond the impasse wields his peace,
a flaming sword stanched tamely in its sheathe,
still flauntingly phallic, but secreted as the
dream of some hidden, heaven-presiding face.
You keep this filtered vigil and endure
the blindfold’s vista, the TV’s chattered light,
glimpse the fruit intact on it’s un-bleeding tree.
Too much: a neat drink, and arm the door.
You, at least, are well who have beheld the sign
that hawks how each day’s work will bring its ease.
1. With a Glint of the Red Horse
The wind in the flue like a great sheet luffing.
Or is it the flag of the Geist’s disposition,
it’s wing-flap un-battened in the jet stream’s trough?
Across slate rooflines the clouds rove in Kevlar.
Armies watch them pass through goggles bright with jaundice.
When the seas incline to rise, will fish be their semaphore?
With factional rhyme fictional, with sin, synopsis.
With trope rhyme entropy, with godhead rhyme goaded.
Your hand in another’s is all you know of Aves.
Home without a hearth leaves the universe stranded
and larvae consume a beech-bole’s thriving Summa.
A flatworm in marl is the earth’s next genesis.
With murmur rhyme memory, with shockwave rhyme salve.
With thresher rhyme threshold, with end rhyme and….