Cardinals, and: One day we will all go back, and: Ex-

near the Mississippi …

Cardinals

The church bell rings at intervals I don't know when.Everything is the same. The eye of the coming stormand the eye of the Cyclops that Odysseus and his menpierced with a burnished log. The end of visionas a means to survive. I see black moths, like tuftsof suspended ash, float along the horizon-line of my eye.There are many of them, which I track to their disintegration—integers of the immortal mind. My Ma says, don't come homeor you will die, and she means it, as I mean it when I say,there is no home for me to come to, just a bed I've slept in before …

The church bell rings at the interval unknown. The restaurant,which I crawled miles to, is closed. There's a water fountain nearby,rusted and paint chipped and old enough to have once read colored,whose bowl I lap from like a dog. The sky looks beautiful from here,raying through the moving greying clouds, on the precipice of burst.The church bell, unknown, rings through them—a summons,a hectoring, a prayer. I want all of it, by which I mean none of it,by which I mean there's a pavilion not far from here that was builtin the late eighteenth or nineteenth century, which to me, ashamedly,sounds all the same, like the end of a world, the beginning of mortal time,where history no longer abstracts, but is a face—thick, scarred, familiar …

The ringing, the unknown, the distance. I stand like a manwho's been sifted too many times, who's twisted himself with the notion of shame, asif it were meaningful, who crawls though capable of running.There's a cloud that is shaking as if it is ringing. The sky rupturesas the sky ruptures. Things fall apart …

                    In the expanse of the interval,I rupture, I riot: rip through drywall // bang on pots // put in plasticthe only piece of artwork I own: an effigy, an idol, a distance measuredbetween myself and what I am made to be. The body of a god, minor.The mind of a man, able. I once tried to kill my only brotherby thinking hard enough about it. I was young, younger. He was oldand didn't want me. I thought about the how and where,which was always confined to our home, the only space I knew at all.I was young and younger and dumb and death didn't matter, the skies not yettestifying to the coming gloom, which I tell my mother about when she callsto check up on me. There is peace in my home, I tell her, but the skies say not for long.The skies, however, hold no meaning for her, unlike my friend Marquise,who tells me the word for apocalypse is the word for revelationwhen I tell him the same. I write this down, that to apocalypse is to reveal.I riot, rip through the expanse …

                    I riot, rip through the expanse of the mindwhere it is ringing like the ringing of wind chimes—now, a bell, struck once, just so …

                    Each sound brings its own penalty. Each utteranceits own counter-utterance. I say things I do not mean but want to.My mother says don't come home or you will die, and I sayI'm coming home anyway, my logic being that I can soundlike a good son before being one, that I can sit along this riverevery night and never swim across …

                    The church bell that I've forgotten,numbed to its sound: cicadas in the summer heat. I call south what is not southbut is the furthest south I've ever been. A pastor once said, in the scriptures,it always says they're going down to Egypt, even as they're moving north,the descent...