Exodus

All afternoon spent waiting for the goods,

the body a decorative box filled with harp music—

something I’d rather not have in my house—

the body a pendulum clock on a hook . . .

Soon our faces will have to be put down.

~

Long before the deluge an ocean covered

everything. The animals dying there became

sediment, which compressed, became the

entablature where God could write the rules—

burnt them in there with his synaptic fire.

~

I must ask the stars to crowd in closer.

When the secret number of sparks have flown

from the wheel, my father is sharpening

the machete again. He will take the head off

the goat in two sweet strokes. He will hang

him in the barn and spill his bowels.

~

Our guests were repeating best venison

I ever ate when our neighbor came in waving

the stubnose she’d just shot her husband with.

When she set it down my father picked it up

and offered her fifty bucks for it—childhood

packed its bags and moved into the attic.

~

Each body’s unique perturbations appear

in the waveshape of the voice: muscle–twitch,

beating cilia, oscillation of cells, dilating

vessels. To read the words of the dead aloud

is transubstantiation. To read the words

of the dying only heals the words.

~

The body a sousaphone conveying through

the slaughterhouse. The body a hankering

of wagon wheels. When finally the tablets

arrived, they were broken and incomplete.

~

Someone’s cry is already fossil. The bullet

already hangs in the throat. A voice vibrates

to the tune of tumor. My father’s cry

is the radiation in my bones.

~

The stars keep their distance. Even in death

he stands over me. The song of the goat

is in the soil, in the boards of the barn.

The mountains rose with their recording stone

waiting for the instruments to be invented,

preserving a language we all die to hear.