Eightfold Chant

Church of broken toasters and singed fuses, church of the dripping roof and chipped chimney stack, of the flooded garage and its split door, gas-hissing pipes and sibilant water heaters, church of piss-poor light and shaky ladders where I unchoke windows and dislodge chopsticks from pipes, smooth curled up wallpaper and key the locks, fix clocks sticking or ticking with different times, church where wings of dead flies drift like petals from cobwebs, ghosts sift through floorboards and the homeless sleep in compost, steeping like tea bags pungent from the leaves' damp weight. Church where I am summoned by the door's clatter of brass to the brown-toothed vagrant who spreads open her overcoat; to the chattering man who communes with pines and brooms the stairs; to the bent, old Japanese woman who forgets her keys, waits for me to twist the lock free so she can scrub floors with Murphy wood soap and a toothbrush, wobble atop a ladder and polish the two-ton bell. On this path I am my uncle setting cubes of cheese into jaws of traps, and my grandmother stirring peas into a pan of fried rice, and my grandfather padding the halls in slippers and gloves, the cold globes of his breath a string of prayer beads weaving me, a mixed-blood grandson, into them.