The moon tonight —
those milky & sliding tears on the face of Christ
that hung in my grandmother’s bedroom!
The purple wardrobe of his open heart!
My grandma & Crashaw, centuries apart, collide tonight
in a lunar spell.
My memory can be so gibbous. My brain the matted back
of an embroidered swatch of cloth. Mosquitos!
So many mosquitos in the eerie light!
I swat my arm, then suck the blood
for its salt. In the penetralia of my existence
there must be some marrow, not this glucose
of the virtuoso, the King of Collisions.
What I would give to see him dangling.
Despised. Out of power.
No one wants to live like this.
The crowd swells. Off with his head! Off
memory, off oeuvre, off with the stuff
atoms are made of! To live without him, to be dim,
to live under the incomparable spell of impossibly cold
Pluto. Aloof & severe. Impossibly,
but unfortunately, like the green glazed tiles
of a distant Chinese roof.