Orphic Politics

THIS, THENSomeone wearing a vest of radon implantscoaxed my tongue to be sweetly laid out in a kurgan of rain.This is the rain’s nest, he said, where you will be joinedby the skin of a galloping horse held up by sticks.Just then God’s mouth filled with lead.People at that time started, it seemed, to bleedin the streets from their ears.This wasn’t force of listening, theyjust were scraped by some large thing moving past,sleet of arrows, yielding shelf of stones.I stared at them, peak, peak, peak. The quills in their handsand feet slicked into me, overthe border into me like I was being shot up, quietly and in secretby drum solos.Let us dip the tip of horror in horror.Randy went down, Albert rappelled under the waves.Something, all we’d never said, was eatingup from below.St. Teresa of Avila was sitting in a gold chairin a breathing-through-a-straw house in a suburbquite far out, where what she’s saying — it eggs slowly fromher mouth — is taken up in spikes along the back legs of the humfrom swelling, overhead wires.