Dayspring

by Anthony Oliveira

the word became flesh coarse hair crooked smile the taste of salt on his clavicle i am the disciple whom he loved

i mean . . . I am the Way the Truth and the Light. the infinite utterance which speaks all being into being and so am unbound by the laws of cause and effect, chronology and chemistry, space and time, so . . .

and from the depths of a linty pocket you offer a hand to me that in the years short years to come i would kiss until i knew its every callus and curve. until the romans broke it, as they break everything, and left it a mangled pulp for us to scrape from their torture post. until the angels made it incorruptible and beneficent sign for all to see. until both left it perfect and golden and alien and unrecognizable to me

i knew and know that i am lost to this to you forever

break my heart as many times as you need to i am yours

a cloud goes over your face and i feel suddenly i am playing with a thunderstorm, playing with a kitten. dandled in your beautiful velveted paws

you mutter to me sweetly wiping every tear from my eye and the eager drool from my chin as on my knees, clutching the firm flesh of pimpled buttocks i try not to scrape god’s perfect cock with my teeth

all dies and all dries and who knows the revolutions of dust?

incarnation means nothing more than in the meat and it was the meat of him i loved red and raw the stinking sweating heft

i know now that love sometimes makes a promise it cannot keep and sometimes no toil can fix the clockwork of a heart dropped from the mantel skittering glass across the floor

what would it profit a man to lose his soul just to save some petty world

in his eyes i see the light that lit the stars the dark that sat brooding upon the waters

my heart is so broken broken is not even right. it is a pulverized thing. a bruised, uncabled tissue, its fibres relaxed and purpling with pooling cooling curdling blood. fruit rotting to succulence

ascend and transcend all you like; this is the wound that will not close touch the plunging suppuration and learn when love is like an abscess left to rot this is the precise spot you have been marred forever

for the time is at hand behold, he cometh with the clouds: first begotten of the dead and every eye shall see and every ear shall hear and those who pierced him shall wail

his hair was white as wool, as white as snow and his eyes were as a flame of fire and his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace and his voice as the sound of many waters and in his right hand seven stars and out of his mouth a sword and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength

the thick world in its rotundity struck flat my thick tongue at the altar struck dumb half-tumesced and baffled and obliterated

love is what ruins. love is what costs. love is a flaming sword at our backs a garden left to ruin and to wild gone to seed

i am lost but even in the wilderness, i would know you

you are hungry—if you are the Son of God, why do you not take what you ache for? is the flesh of the world ripe, but not for eating? will you wait for it to slacken, let its juice drop for flies, when you might tear and be sated? what kind of Lord would let his sons go hungry? what kind of God deny his creations what they crave? put your mouth to the hardness of the rock, and find it soften to nourishment

and you became my faith

and behold for all your labour: even the ocean itself will burn

what kind of God would let a world come to this?

there is no ethical consumption under corporeality

The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

mingling god’s seed with mine in thick joyful gouts as you laughed like water converting me unto thyself, so that i sought neither wife, nor any hope in this world

and god ran out like an egg and the golden molten yolk of him poured over you liquid limpid light sudden and magnificent like a hive breaking the stores of its nectar to anoint forth a queen and i your drone helpless trembling waiting for you to use the end of me and i stood upon the lawn and listened to the silence of a dispersing epiphany

i was utterly lost. i was utterly yours

i am clean i am made new

for behold: i have come to set a fire and god how i wish it was already burning

god is love. and love is just this: it is yourself breaking apart shaken to pieces refashioned entirely and made new love is suffering for each other god and man and life

take what you need and give what you can and the baskets passed, and the people gave and took, each according to their ability and need. and in the baskets small sardines and halves of buns and figs and bright wrapped candies proliferated. and there was enough, and when it was done the baskets were full to overflowing

and i beg: hurt me

taste the strange flesh of Sodom i have grown all my life as salt fruit for you upon my bones

i was not there to carry his cross and to die of crucifixion is to asphyxiate is to suffocate is to put the weight of your tearing body through the legs to the iron in your wrists and feet to gasp a breath and to attempt to gulp a breath is agony is excruciating

don’t pray in public those that do have already got what they wanted out of it and it had nothing to do with god

when even hope exhausts even despair has its faithfulness holding on to life long enough for grace to find it

wonder what it must be like: to grow young again a two-thousand-year-old baby yelling “again” at the sunrise

am ever so much more than twenty. i grew up long ago i promised not to i couldn’t help it

it may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike it may be that god makes every daisy separately but has never got tired of making them

to be rich is to be damned

saint wilgefortis maiden martyr genderfuck daughter of god pray for us

seems to me if i were god then miracles are just what you do to clean up your own fuck-up

my brother and the figure that crouched atop him, filthy hands upon his robes, nails seeking purchase in his meat

it’s ok know yourself again

and they came to him and asked: if heaven’s so real then what happens if a woman marries seven times like if her husbands keep dying so she had seven husbands whose wife will she be in heaven? and he said: please do not ask me stupid fucking questions

in nesting in the Tree of Life, then, the cormorant foretells its destruction—turning the immortally blossoming tree into the dead wood that would become the planks of the cross in the water of the harbour is the mismade cormorant. unlovable, inedible, no song but a guttered grumble. wet and cold waiting for the sun

the fox has a den and the bird has a nest only humans go homeless

believe what you believe choose what you choose speak what you will and do what you can love always the rest is not yours to control to wield to answer for

in the assumptions of art even at the end she is young and whole and spirals upward in a graceful aerial pirouette uncertainly but beatifically from her dormition towards a vertiginous baroque light because she was perfect and kind and my mom and death cannot touch perfection it is pretty to think so