Sweet Purgatory

My God, it’s quiet out there
in the dark this morning, cool,
still, witched in a full moon’s
soak: A dream-calm, which
means I’m walking on
some path which winds the
garden’s visceral interior,
stepping over everyone
else who have fallen in
thrall of sweet splendor:
Here are three college
students from Michigan
on spring break, two guys
and a careening coed,
half-naked, their sex
like raw wounds milked
back by some hidden
mouth under desire
in a wave’s backdrawing sigh.
Here’s a developer
in Dockers and a white
golf shirt, clutching a fist
of zinnias torn from
every patch where it grew,
his forehead high as
a backhoe, a vault
sated on its remits
& knitted by bribes.
Here’s a stripper and
her john in the
weeds which overcame
them as she lowered down,
sour honey to pent money
drowning the catacombs of
Rome, the empty hiss
of their encounter
unzippering a moon
up from the ocean
so black and driven to find
light it shatters all
it sees. Here’s a teacher
with twelve children
stilled from class riot
to its causes -- or is that
consequence, the rigor
of each child’s dash
toward any door
freezing at threshold
where there’s forever
more in ever less?
There’s the rich
man from Isleworth
face down & spread-eagled
over a bed of pink
and red petunias,
swooning where they
smother; here’s the Puerto
Rican grownup boy
with the sound of
Easton gunfire in
his ears, licking at
his mamacita’s nipple
or a penta bloom. Here’s
a biker on the pavement
where he tumbled
spilling brains over
faux brawn; there’s the
lineman from Kentucky
whose fingers twitch
the semaphore of wind;
here’s the Christian
housewife whose ears
are trilling heaven’s
gold like Roundup
on a wilted orchid’s
profanely gorgeous bloom.
There’s my boss with
a DVD in one hand
and my future in the other,
here’s the guy from AA
who died last weekend
in his sleep -- an
esophageal hemhorrage --
sitting alert and calm
and opening his mouth
to say something to us;
there’s my wife with
one of her beautiful
sewn sheets
embroidered over
her naked shape &
she’s talking into
a telephone of milkweed
to her sister, consoling,
cursing God, crying
softly and inconsolate
in my ear. And there
I am in the garden’s
darkest corridor this
still, moon-wretched
night, holding a stick
in my hand as I
scratch lines in the dirt
only You understand,
words I cannot remember
here though I feel
the prescience of night
and dirt and the world’s
heart sleeping in them,
deep in its desire for
You in all your perplex
and fallen verdure,
reaching for the
sweetness in those
tiny pinwheel jasmine
blossoms spinning like
angelic demon sufis
at the garden’s gate to here,
so savagely still and silent
and sweetwater blue.