as prophet as body
What happens to language when spoken. How the crowd gathers on the hilltop, earnest in their desire to witness the lie, whichever one it may be. How the queen's prophets squint in this direction, determined it isn't they. The way it must always begin, nevertheless. How the sun caresses the face of Judea in famine, the monarchs somewhere lost among the spectators. Making manifest eventually: the murmur that gasps through the multitude. Then haughty response, laughter of queen, soldiers interspersed within the margins, gleam. How the quiet returns, the altars assembled. The wood creaks, sings. Yet how the land cracks beneath their feet. Desiring respite, fire. Desiring proof of God.
Yet what it must invariably become. What happens to language when etched on a page. When carved upon a stone. Something shrouded, imperfect. Coercion disguised, if not made of itself, admitting encryption. Sometimes in such pronouncements as these: how one alphabet stems from another, then seeks separation. And yet, correspondence. That phonemics find parity. That image of sound finds, discovers, emerges with purpose from the same crack in the soil. But look at this: how acclimatization functions even here. Mound of dirt instead of jut of wrist. Something smooth and moist gliding behind, between fingers, length of them. Bleating in the distance.
Body of text, prostrate upon the sheets. As in supplication. Beseeching, what must precede what comes after. Eyes tracing lengths of outlines. Acquisition of literacy. How accustomed emerges from hesitant, spewing soon forth numb. The queen and her ultimatum. How the body contorts. Alien. Dead language only yearning to be excavated. Curated. Articulated. Where lie buried then the indigenous familiar? What holocaust their demise? Longing wrest from this interminable wreckage of quiet, of unspokenness, to be caressed by native tongue?
I am avid in my hollowing out of this cavern of air. What I am only in the gravity to pursue: presence. Perhaps existence. And of the syntax, cadence incipient to the languors of my youth: body following insinuations of this tunneling. In the beginning, light. Perhaps substitute for illumination, definition. Something to make bold the proximities, the skeleton boundaries. What I am talking about: an attempt to essay. Promises of a sleeping god. And what I really mean to say: an attempt to really stay, this time. How the sky refuses to relinquish anything, the clouds persistent in their answer of repudiation. My body trembling in its attempts to maintain stasis. Reclines. The words aching to fly out, off the page. Air.
The secret withheld. Indentation of this refusal. Truncated this desire, no sojourner. Sustained by the ministrations of birds, I ascend the precarity of this slope. The eyes of my people everywhere. Imminence of what resounds with the mouths of these jars. The hollows filled by water, lips cracked, curved. Hush that descends over the spectators, the solitary command. Stones dry with defiance. Desire. Sky shuddering. What happens to language when spoken. What it must invariably become.
And my body now as light refracted through layers of seam and bleached cloth. The fabric of my skin as sackcloth, hair as dust. Lamenting in the shadow of this cedar, speaking in tongues constrained, offer lamb upon damp altar. Awaiting fire from the sky. Evidence of heaven. For it. Example for its own allegory. What this could be alluding to. My body as light as word of mouth, passed on. Its only weight: intent. Occasionally, desire. The ashes it leaves with the descent of smoke, catharsis. Reconciliation with hunger. Incarnate here, something that looms over the struggling, tangle of limbs. Softness of fur. The warm pulse, the open mouth. And now the act. My body as light.
To be here, between the firmament and skin of earth, interim bubble of atmosphere, flux, how these molecules zip into and out of what consists, comprises, inhabits. How the rain begins, and washes over barren Judea, quenches her thirst. What now my body, what now my flesh. Where to locate the exchange. The queen in flight, ink streaming from her eyes and the wreckage. The crowd closing in on itself, the prophets, the lie. Where now to seek refuge. And when the aftermath. What happens to a body when cut open, sacrificed upon a stone. When spoken. When held.