Foregone Psalm

Prayer chimes muted any chords

that might have siphoned light

from the clouds. We heard snow

in a field. The absence of headstones

made it more the cemetery,

the wind’s silence even more

a howling causeway to an afterlife.

Wings are the refuge of a sinner,

is how you read the ice

night gasped onto our windowpanes.

You slit every pillow for the down

to build the cathedral

in which you’d renounce forgiveness.

You said you heard angels

roiling up and down the cloisters

of the song I stopped singing,

its chorus dark with witching

hour and bell toll. Come spring,

leaves will bloom the colors

they fall, then fall. Somewhere

under my tongue, you said,

a woman touches her knees to stone,

her belly swollen with a world

so doomed the god she prays to

envies her for it. Somewhere

under yours is an altar on which

we blessed all he cursed.