Assassin Song

What if, in his naked body pulled to its teeth
on a rack in the fairgrounds, is not a glut of gods —
returning to his muscles like vanished antibodies —
but something more migrant
that is racing toward, arriving at, that impossible
staple of faith, gaining urgency
as each boulder is placed upon his gut
and the horses titter majestically; pull, pull, pull —
his navel aquiver,
muscles losing the count of themselves in pain
and what is being done, O what is being done —
what is coming — 

a woman, like the prayer that forgets itself
and evolves same to same, its melody the bruised
luck of an angel, harmony its forbidden face,
or hands dressing wounds the dead no longer feel — 

— like this naked man, whose father, having had
a father, was a father to this boy,
who became this man who once
was a living man: but what man? What idea?
She washes him
and almost preserves it: the splendor of that face
that lately wished it could be more
than unresolved, more than the brilliant
counterfeit 

it came to be;
could rise in one great city one morning and fall
in another 

the next. Now a shroud, stained and threadbare,
will obscure that terrifying singularity: the days
before: on a coastal gangway without a god:
the clutched-at hours: the mouthfuls of sand
eaten on the beach where water bloused
over a low barricade, and he was found at last,
obsolescent and mumbling at the sun —

still unimagined, all the dear, dead days.