And I'm going to end on two poems.
To New Orleans.
These Hands, If Not Gods.
Haven't they moved like glory, like rivers,
like light over the seven days of your body?
And wasn't that good then at your hips?
Isn't this what God felt when he pressed together
the first beloved?
Everything, fever, vapor, atman, pulsus, finally,
a sin worth hurting for, finally,
a sweet, a you are mine.
It is hard not to have faith in this.
From the blue, brown clay of night,
these two potters crushed and smoothed you into being,
built your form up.
Grind then curve, atlas of bone, fields of muscle,
one breast of fig tree.
The other, a Nightingale, both morning and evening.
Oh, the beautiful making they do of trigger and carve, suffering
and stars.
Aren't they too the dark carpenters
of your small church?
Have they not burned on the altar of your belly,
eaten the bread of your thighs, broke you to wine, to ichor,
to nectareous feast?
Haven't they riveted your wrists?
Haven't they had you at your knees?
And when these hands touched your throat,
showed you how to take the apple and the rib,
how to slip a thumb into your mouth and taste it all?
Didn't you sing out their 99 names?
Zahir, Aleph, hands time seven, Sphinx, Leonids, locomotura,
rubidium, August, and Melissa.
And when you cried out, oh, Prometheans,
didn't they bring fire?
These hands, if not gods, then why when you have come to me
and I have returned you to that from which you came?
Bright mud, mineral salt. Why then do you
whisper, oh, my Hecatonchire, my Centimani,
my hundred-handed one.