Christ Enters Manhattan
III
What paradise
rises? Headless bird,
bone & ash. Arteries cut:
what feast pulses with that flood?
The powers of the sky are unlocking.
Our quandries deepen.
Justice, Speech, Death.
Welling clarity, breaking rage,
oblivion flooding the streets...
Evening. Horizon draining of its gold.
Flying snakes die in desert heat.
Babylon fades, in and out.
The rituals of
humiliation regear
& a new scourge rolls.
That corner, a decade back.
A sunlit crowd, a girl struck dead...
Night's a depot: a pipe in a pit
a flare of moonlit sewer
a paper-roofed gully
a dreaming trench
in front of the cathedral...
Primordial pair. Blossom, seed...
Elsewhere clouds enfold our union...
White wall, mapped with shadow.
As you awake scenes of sacrifice flower
scattering you as the one now ash whose blood
still untested
chills in a distant lab.
(Unsettled spirit. I see you.)
Night: so gouged its lunar.
River of stone pouring over wire mesh.
Broken hill, the ditchwork drifting up the street.
Oracle of Egypt, a concrete jag.
Gibberish, a bridge at the burning edge.
What arcadia or morgue...
In seepage of cold. Waiting word:
of glorious thrall, or armies plunged into fire
or how piety, daring, and cruelty rescue the soul from death.
What great change
or annihilation of knowledge
or chaos fresh learning brings to light...
Slain actor, streaked window.
She speaks with dignity to the camera.
Courthouse steps, the trial a tabloid coda
to the infamous parolee's memoir...
(These began as hers. My cadence betrayed them.
Now they're the murderer's words...
What destruction
will clear away a world rotting
like the ribs of the boat of the sungod...
Air hammers, dome of the old post office.
Bright architecture, violent hole.
The dream abandons me
leaving less than the prophecy of an exile...
(Within a gently sleeping body the
mind's terrified image
of the body awake
lies shaking, in darkness,
& calling out.)
Copyright © 1995 Joseph Donahue
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