Electric Noon

At downtown midnight's blazing height,
sky signs the color of electric sunset
and coral reefs tell me I need more sizzle,
tell me my life is incomplete,
my world going down in flames,

the single star that shines above them
across the empty universe
unreachable, not for sale, and thus dead to them.
My face in a shattered looking-glass,
too, is dead,

dead from trying to squeeze itself beneath the skin
of the men of electricity's blazing midnight—
shouting men, who wear crowns of silver flame
and whose robes of midnight purple
shatter the grass beneath their feet
into shards of glimmering green—
and when I swim beneath their skin,

my true skin burns and boils with the blood of a thousand centuries,

brimming over with the knowledge
that peace is found not in electricity,
not in humming,
but in the dark midnight of a silent country road,
in the air-made cross of an imperfect preacher,
in the steady thrum of ancient words kept and set down
and translated and printed and heard in my head,
the miracle of mystery,
when all the lights extinguish
save one,
and the faltering flicker of that hot light

becomes a cooling brook
through which blazes a single star,
the enemy of the electric men,
the sun which is all suns, everywhere,

and I come to the edge of that brook,
and I feel its cool warmth embrace me
as I slip down into it,

and I am shrouded
in a blanket of golden water
which is the hidden, silent, mysterious doorway
to heaven,
that rickety wooden house
that is my home.