Solstice

Summer lies over the meadow crest
of the longest day --
generation, heat, and green --
and I wink back.



The keen eye knows
how to read the strata,
the intercalations of blood and black,
against which ghost weeds
like pilgrims
strain at their roots.



The unctuous dead
well and gush
through the least fissure.
They are our treasure,
our memento, boiling
in the noonday sun,



as in the heavy air
birdsong queers --

parasol parapluie

parasol parapluie

and rain snakes down from heaven
in disguise.



Stanzas, filaments --
wind through the grass field
weaves
an ocean, a breathing
beast or breast,



and there are births
that seem to fast
forward into a last
feast, you know the one,

you scan the linen length
and, as far as you can see,
is the presence of enemies.

Oh, Christ,
you mutter, Mother,
prayer and curse,



into the ear of the world,
waiting for the te
absolvo
that never comes.



Here, tiny as bedstraw --

entheo-

incarn -

and, for the sport of it,
the meadow's working celebrations

from which, Dear God, your Christ can't be deduced,
in which He wanders, nonetheless,



graceful

in the din and dust of the world's
original sin and original blessing,



graceful, in a loud boy,



graceful, in a burned-out boat,



graceful in the thing that clutches at my throat,
the that I am
and its unkind obverse,

once nausea,

now You, Dear Three-in-One.