"Once, just barely no longer a child/I was asked to lie in a field of wheat grown on charnel-blood./My body’s shape marked by bent and broken stalks,/I was to look between specific stars/until a message was spelt for me in the heavens./There were half-birthed animals, out there in the fields,/dogs with cracked cartiledge for paws,/calves without eye sockets./They were made sick by the pull of the stars,/searching the ground for a hole to die in.
"I could hear the slow slack breathing of other people,/searching the same skies, the light broken by the tears turned to hoar’s frost in their eyes./Years passed, and we collected moisture in our lungs,/decayed memories of Ligetti, Ruysbroeck,/the index left of our shared carnal sin,/you asking me to identify the stains which remained —/cloud-bodies, ink losing form in water.
"When they had left me, when I had emptied,/I beheld a vision of the horned Moses./Betrayed by Jerome and cursed by eternal memory,/a mumbled exegesis as to my misunderstanding/of Elijah as the first of the weather-prophets,/of which I may be the last/(should these truly prove to be the end days).
"Were I a prophet/(which is to say a singer of songs)/I would be sent to fufil deed and premonition,/not to make speeches and frayed book-parts./What, then, I spoke through cracked lips and dried throat,/of Ezekiel, of Jeremiah? What, then, of you?/My tendons severed and my limbs grown as roots,/I ached to turn myself to face him,/but my eyes would only lie, my sight mislead./You know nothing of which you speak, he told me,/and I knew to the bottom that he was right./In the distance, I heard the approach of the beast.
"These is but one moment,and all things contained within./My name has been burned away,/betrayed by cross and crown and cursed by eternal memory,/and now I am but the blood from which the wheat feeds,/until all of me is my imprint in the grain."
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