But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise

In Leaving My Lover Teaches Me Half a Bible Story

17 In Leaving My Lover Teaches Me Half a Bible Story Inside my heart’s blackening egg, where some might say they see a lake of fire, or, Asmodeus picking his fingernails in the doorframe of my wedding nights I see a slack-jawed barn down on its knees, cradled up against the interstate. You know the one. Call it clairvoyance or sorrow from self-undoing. Mutable water signs or whatever . Lion/lamb of the calendar. My sound denatured —all cluck and bang—knowing the too-late clang of this road travels long and longer. My mouth is full of permissions, more sleepy talk of killing this man or that man. I stuff my lips with wine and livers. Inside I see a flock of wasps buoying the carcass of a deer over Nameless Creek, over Mad River, past Mount Comfort 18 & up the knoll where they bury it in the dirt of the barn floor— flinty & stalwart. Watch its body vanish in the mouths of shimmery creatures that slip flesh from bone. In some years this deer will want to rise & see what kind of day it is. Will it still be March? Will Tobia be walking still? & Sarah with her drowsy hips padding the earth on her nth husband’s grave? Knocking this way then that way, the bones curl up from crisp dust to ring with the hard laughter. Always a kind of wailing. ...