Raised to Walk in Newness of Life

If, after everything, you’re remade,
your voice will be an element set on
a table like bread. The kind eaten
as part of miracle.  We are here as elements
 
and miracles.  Transfiguration.
A mirror becomes an animal,
something living to see us and
not forget.  We’re to learn to bend
 
a question into a blank.  Make
today’s imaginary kingdom into
a child’s eyes.  Raise a field, wild,
into a blackoak grove.  And yet
 
roots find their errors. Impassable mass.
Dust’s habitat in the lung.
An atom becomes cancer,
September becomes a tomb.
 
My mind becomes a kind of poison.
My thumb and finger,
hammer and barrel of a gun.
My book sunk in an old pond.
 
Water melted my insides,
slaked lime, remarkable damage.
Water becomes a calendar,
its endless grid a punishing city,
 
its endless shed held in a single drop.
You drown in ritual, rattle as
time’s skeleton.  But if you can explain
the land as light and light as amber
 
and amber with a word,
you have birthed a name
where there is no name.
You have made bracken into paradise.