I miss the holy boy I once pretended to be.
When the reason to live was simple—
love is not only greater than ruin,
it is the master of ruin. We are holy
is what I knew and there was no shore
beyond that holiness. Only love.
If a strong stone stirs in me,
know that it is backed by a mountainous
softness. That you could push a sparrow’s
feather through my breast as easily as
you can feel the wind. That I will be soft
until I disappear into it. Tell me, tell me
every city cannot be romantic and I will
take you and push flowers up from
bar-tops in biker bars, rescue a poor
pup from his master’s whip, sing hymns
from every dead fountain and grocery store,
turn the turning of rubble into mother Mary’s
harp: she bleeds notes broken, she bleeds
notes beautiful. Hear the lovers in the air!
They are there, so many of them there.
There is love in the mother. There is love
in the bar room. There is love in the monastery.
A whole lot of love in the hand that reaches
for the wrong hand. I spend my time often
in a single room thinking of love outside
of the room. Everywhere else. And it
almost completes me. The void
I preach is never what is truly missing.
And in the ungodly hours my face turns
into objects you wouldn’t believe: knife,
bird bath, plow, tourmaline, a cross
on a hill saving no one. They are not metaphors.
They are new ways of seeing the world.
We make our own belief. To be truthful
to my only heart, I have wept to it vows.
I keep them inside and they decorate
the walls of my flesh and bone like
ancient drawings in caves. I do not
understand my own language. One night,
drunk on a hillside in West Virginia,
I tell my father the hole he left is
also the hole he fills. That his ruin
and regret one day will confetti
into a beautiful poem. I am trying
to write that poem. With both pen
and body. I have been trying
my entire life.
