Final Prayer in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception I

Who sought the theatrics: Who begged diagnosis
get us off the hook, keep us in the rhapsody,
and what force infests the night out of cad ventriloquy,
the inimical boyhood that taunts us, the symmetry of shattered-strong

women, even still the ones with tattoos
of swallows growing up on the small of their backs
could all look loved in the right light, the painted light
mything your glass windows.

What else is worse than nuclear fallout that I do not fear?
Tell me there is nothing mad in my foreign-smelling black
and I will mouth the dusk as it canopies
this sanctimonious debris anatomized in the mirror.
Tell me and I may sign myself with your cross.

When without ever coming back to fix these battered wombs,
already forgotten or only glandular to what has been
I bargain for remnants of dreams like shards of ice in the eye.

There is no need for ancient landscapes, no penance here
through televangelists, no grassquit slipping these vines to wine.

Peel back the scales of these untranslatable African songs, reveal
them more syllabled than your “Gloria.” And see the black-toothed Homo
habilis you’d expect. See queens and knights left over to check-

mate. What is harder to deal with than an island nowhere with
its catalytic lack of witness? The annulled
reek of bodies clustered for decades to keep from killing most things?

No one ever came to my door in searching –
for you, no one, except for you –