History of the Church — Part One

I feel grace descend like whiskey-scented 
oil poured over me in the upper room on 
my way to heaven. I dance in the heat of 
a fire, like ghosts following Sitting Bull 
to their deaths, pounding the earth as 
I whirl, feeling the scent move out through 
my veins, pulled by the dance into my feet 
and fingers and loins, the beating gyre 
burning my bones and blood back into the 
earth. Spinning faster, dizzy with peace 
and the nearness of understanding. One 
voice sings like a cry thrown out across 
the crush of the world, like the weeping 
question of Enoch, or Adam, or Samuel, 
and the sun turns to snow whiter than 
noon-day. And in that glow I rest, 
healed and glistening, warm fatigue where 
once arose the aroma of belief and the 
coryphee of hope. And, then, as it will, 
in the denouement of grace, the dance winds 
down, becomes a shuffle, and the twirling 
scent dissipates in the gnawing whisper 
that is only wind. And I wonder where 
have we come to in these many years? 
And where is here? Is this the place, a 
desert beyond what is known? Now, do 
we move without the stillness, caught in 
the rhythm of our own shouts, unable to 
hear the song cast across our sight like a 
fleeing bird or an unanswered child? And 
in the hammering silence I make out no reply, 
just a kneeling, drunken man unable to rise, 
his lolling head turning the world back and 
forth, his yawping gasp a cry that spins us 
back and starts the scratching dance anew.