PSALTER

Psalterium is the book of meat,
And Psalter is the word made flesh,
Twin oracles, consanguine and discrete,
Who serve the delvers into bowels and text
As augurs from the abattoir and crèche.

Just weigh the mantic power of entrails
That drew the haruspices and the sibyl,
Who raised in their revelatory vigil
Swollen chalices and gaunt grails.

Those membranous pleats, once mucoid, glaucous, cystic,
Have dried to pages, gone to grace from gristle,
Velum to vellum, vesicle to vessel,
Body and embodiment of the mystic
When death's corruption's gathered into missal.

One divine and one human
Organ of accumulation and acumen
Fuse in the ritual of divination:
Psalterium of hymen and rumen,
And Psalter of hymn and oblation.

THE HOTEL ST. BONAVENTURE

A flare had caused the cars to swerve,
With shattering glass and barriers wrenched and ended,
The hotel St. Bonaventure, rising at the curve,
Lifts gilded cylinders like rosaries suspended.

A fireman turns, an engine backs askew,
By the side of the road a priest kneels absolving
A dying passenger already screened from view,
Saint and ambulance wait with lights revolving.

The uniformed attendants leave the scene,
Eyes veiled, their efforts unavailing,
Resplendent towers, consolatory or assailing,
Reflect without reflecting from a soundless sheen.

The hooded face of Bonaventure broods
Over the embankment in a vitreous sheath
Of cowled steel with beams half-seen beneath:
Weight that levitates and gravity that eludes.

The crowd waits for a message, a conveyance,
In the shadow of the Franciscan who hovers
Over the arroyo as each new penitent discovers —
Stopped — a sudden stillness, life in abeyance.