Heaven's Gate

Heaven always hides itself,
like a spinning spiral castle
with a gate that lowers only
thrice in all our lives. It
showers light somewhere
behind my beloved;
I know it’s there but she fills the
doorway with that sad
familiar strangeness I’m so
enthralled with that I
forget she’s just the raiment and daily gold
hosannah of the goddess
I’ll never get to love though
she’s always calling my name.
Another cold front is changing
Florida back into its
bruited cousin, ravaged
and windswept, the 4 a.m.
sky a cloud-mottled cooling
augur of the solstitial dark
ahead. Our cats sleeping
in their curl outside and in,
noses down, eyes sealed
in the pleasure of cat dreams.
Wounds got me here, in my
battening and betterment
of them I mean: they
were inside augments
of that heaven’s phatom
wavering beyond bad days
and nights. Your physic was
horrific as I learned to fall but
good, taking comfort
in false heavens as the
only havens this world
affords. That spreading
glow of whiskey which
tranced the flighty
brain, the wholesale
revival of the sacred
in my whoring, settling
for love’s obverse,
moon instead of Earth,
down some drunken
woman’s drenched
ravines: In these
my old wounds
became cathedrals
of awe and awfulness
in which the toll of
nightly masses damn
near killed me. I
in sotted funk,
bellowing my orisons
as the sea belched
all its moons. I did
not die but for years
was worse, the blackout
revenant in a blacklit
tableaux of rude indigo,
God’s curse on every
woman I got close to,
my need too freighted
with high greed to
be much of a lover,
much someone a
woman cared to call
beloved. Well, that
song is by now a
tattered old standard
which muzak stations
leak like syrup from
the speakers of every
elevator going down.
I got off before I
hit The bottom, got
therapy, joined
AA and worked the
steps, pouring oceans
of salt verbiage into
those old-school wounds,
eating all the scum
I scattered wide
while beating this
blue drum which I’ll
never understand,
much less mint or
mortgage. Years are
now passing with me
down another way,
reverent of the depths
in which I once
was revenant and fell,
hallowing that harrowing
by ringing the same
old ding-dong bell
cast in the blackout
abysms of Your hell.
Is each migraine’s
hooves the white wings
of old hangovers, blue
echoes of black drums?
Is each song a gripping
back down the gradient
You once reached up
to grab me by the
balls, my going down here
like Beowulf in the mere
to where M’am Grendel’s
tending bar at that
tavern ghosting the
bottom of my nights, her
teats squirting the milk
of all I leaked in her,
her ghostly smiles
dragging every line I write
down to the same dark
rumpled beds? Heaven
hides itself even here,
where a life survived
to build a bright chapel
of love exactly where
old wounds fell, the
same old music of
rapine and rapture
evanescent and horrific
in the wings, distilling
quaffs I cannot drink
but think the depths of here.
To shamanize is to keep
wounds open when all
the bars are closed
and my wife sleeps deeply
in her life somewhere,
always, upstairs. You
bid me bang the bejeezus
out of a drum that’s both
ventricle and testicle
of dreams of heaven’s wash
and hiss, a shore which
hears my feet as I gallop
down a life crying blue
heaven, blue moon’s name.
It’s a scarring motion,
a door of flame, a warring
lover no salt or swoon
can tame, much less blame.