In Church

1 In the rheumatic heat of July, when Public Enemy blared on the blasters in a time when arbitrage and foreign policy were bureaus of each other, I made a wrong turn off Broadway and wound up at St. John the Divine where I sat in the hot dark until the traffic died. * And a voice comes over some columns to the breeze of the Golden Horn over the cypress groves and flowing bougainvillea where the bright blue weather and the old seawalls come together, where crates of cardamom and musk are piled and the cattle hang in blood above the brass, where the grain boats stink and red pleasure barges drift where Jason sailed for his fleece— a voice comes out of the dead water. In great Sophia light pours in rosy bars on the porphyry and the green marble till the air blooms, and a chrysalis of lit crosses makes circles in the air. Light falls through the lunettes like arrows of gold that could’ve sneaked up the Virgin’s dress. Had the Holy Ghost flitted in it would’ve been lost in the glare and the kiss of peace Justinian blew from the ambo. * Incantations flutter and rhyme in the apse like wings in a cloud of incense thinning on the gold-leafed vaults where the tongue’s vibration lingers in the upper air, and rises and rises as if the dome could open to a half-hemisphere of heaven where in the translucent glitter of the Kingdom the Saints are poised in gracious robes with their thousand-year-frozen faces— the one truth glued on the grout of their lips. 2 I sit with the incense of memory, and a bath of dark pours from the vaults above the pew Outside, boutiques of money collide with the street fires in Harlem, whole skyscrapers are levitated by arbitrage, and the only inside takeover I can negotiate is myself in this pew with my herringbone jacket which I should chuck in the Salvation Army bin down the block, so I could join the line of choir- boys in their last innocent ritual as they stand before the mounted sermon sign “he shall bring forth judgment unto truth” (Isaiah 42:3). The Puritans because they believed God’s altar needs not their polish lifted the boulder of truth higher than the glittering face of the Nazarene once leaded in glass. For the spirit they swallowed stones and shattered all the panes. But beneath the lavender arch of a Canon Table in an old Gospel I once tasted the consubstantial dewdrop in the faded color of a peacock’s wing. So while a stone sinks to the bottom of my river, a peacock’s wing floats by the shore. Who tells it like it is: Isaiah or Procopius? 3 I started walking backward down the aisle when I heard and thought I saw in the strange fenestration of that light— a voice, first incoherent, and then sharp as if it were in my ear There is no reign that executes justice and judgment; is that why you whine?