Wednesday, January 23, 2019

aperture

my brother said,
he said:
- about the cleavages of
religion and its crowns-of-thorn
swagger and its impoverishing hues -
'i believe in god
but not God; it's
nobody's business
what i believe in'
there was always a red
gem in his mouth when
he talked about the
protrusions of faith,
how they herniated and
metastasized into the
hardened stones of
shaded, casting-down silences.
how the spokespeople
of that particular brand
of BOGO magic were
the salt of the deadened
and cast men like
him from the gardens
of their own skin and
banished real Truth.
'i mean...i believe in a
lot of things,' he would
go on, spooning out to
me his new-old poverty.
'the Celts. the Pagans. the
Native Americans. the
Christians...' he would trail
off, thinking of others to
moisten his argument.
i would listen while he
waved his hands
and sipped his beer and dragged
his cigarette across our secrets.
we grew up in the same
yellow seafoam of
hymns and overspreading
glories-be and throbbing prayers.
and while i had found ounces
of wonder and joy in
the bedrock of our
family's church -
had found a ripe
wind among the souls
there with people who'd
burned their acres for a
view to answers -
he had grown calloused
early, his feet pricked
by coals and his hands
tied together by foreign tongues.
his version of those days
were calcified by an endless
voyage outward in search
of the master of his confusions
so that, later in life,
he came to feel god-not-God
in what he could smell
and taste; what he could
breathe in with his own eyes.
it was no surprise to me
then that the pale pebbles
of long-away ancestors, who'd
frolicked under the stars and
sang to the wind, found their
way into the pockets of
his soul and within the underthings
of his fragrant dreams.
he was fore-bent that way from
birth; always had a dark
grandeur in the manner in which
he stole the galleries of hurt faces.
his mantel was firm in
its place from conception;
his mark was that of a
man of inexhaustible refuge.
'fuck.
if i want to read the bible,
i will read the bible. if I
want to go outside naked and
dance and shout at the moon, i will.'
he had what i wanted:
a singular delirium of endless
flowers unkept in a striated glass
vase on a sill;
a bald wink at the fires of
hell and a thirst for a glacial
voice that boomed and
cleaved the contemptuous.
he had muscular glory in all
the things i was taught were white avenues to damnation: hammer-pride, sexual fury, profane histories.
i wanted for his open mouth,
his believing star, his volume,
his soft-cold-rain humor,
his aperture opened to the pages
of his own scriptures.
he said,
my brother said to me:
'have a beer'
and i blushed no thanks
'suit yourself'
he smirked and lit
another cigarette and told
me here as in other times later,
'you're just afraid.'

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