Panel I

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. 

Panel II 

In the dry places, the chafing, fevered wind 
cleaves our desert hearts and hardscrabble 
eyes in desiccated, crackling vision, the 
gnawing revelation a jagged sacrament 
which does not come softly, but breaks 
off, the hard intolerant, and you feel every 
edge of its strength, every point, every 
angle of its creviced power along your 
seal-skin smoothness, its trilled blades of 
bloody belief rough, as the razored lips 
of its certain promise slice fair-skinned 
ardent flesh, the puckered aching slit 
unhealed, a blanched crimson stigmatum 
leached and pulsing and pliant, puffed 
and slowly throbbing, a seeping scar of 
withered intent. In a dirty windblown 
doorway, a single unsheltered bulb pours 
a triangle of yellowed light downward like 
new revelation, and we turn, slowly, its 
shimmering witness calling, ancient water 
whispers, rise, take up thy bed, and walk, 
and in the distance, a sleeping form, Jacob 
or maybe Joseph, becomes a dusty rider 
who gathers the reins and mounts the saddled 
and lathered back of history, turns slowly and 
fades into the purling furnace of a lustrous, 
rippling judgment, another voiceless wail 
scratched across the sky. The earth rolls upon 
her wings, and the sun gives his light by day, 
and the moon gives her light by night, and the 
stars also give their light, as they roll upon their 
wings in their glory, in the midst of the power of 
God while darkness licks at the edges of our lives.

Panel III 

He will say, if you bring forth what is in 
you, it will give you life. But if you do not 
bring forth what is in you, you will die. 
Grief soaks your blood dry, your prayers 
fly up, tied on flagged horns, hemal signifiers 
of queasy righteous intent. In the afternoon 
silence, all motion and sound beat to 
submission by the anviled heat, your hard 
straining retches sob into the bright air, 
the stench of them an oozing soundless 
splash, decaying sight across the lengths 
of time and all eternity, chained, fiery 
laughter soaking your dead filament eyes. 
In a cracking secret motion, you bend, lift 
a now-useless leg to a knee-lodged angle, 
stretched up pant cuffs showing bleached 
hairless skin like a shark’s belly in the kiln 
fire of noon-day, and you brush your shoe, 
the tips of your soiled fingers marking 
flesh-carved canals across your patterned 
brogues, three graceful, lingering swipes 
upon the world that compass its lives, its 
violence and horror, the vengeance and 
apathy of endless generations, screaming 
Bosch figures now just dust, brushed off, 
amerced and wiped clean from your polished 
helpless anger so you can rest once again, 
spent, vacant senescence restored to your 
austere, keening fullness, the forgotten 
commandment withering in the searing 
glare. And when he asks you where you 
are from, say we have descended from light. 
And when he asks you who you are, tell him, 
we are its children. And if he asks what is the 
sign by which he can know that you do not lie, 
tell him, it is motion and rest. Motion and rest.