Burying A Ram
by Christian Stanzione
A sacred song plays in the summer –
When it goes,
you can’t deny that the space between language and words
is like the field between atoms that stops constant collision;
or the human voice reaching for God,
and finding only separation.
When I go,
I’ll slide under my skin
and put mud on my bones.
When you’re embalmed in earth
then you’re something new –
“The sun is not a hole
in the vault to heaven,”
because it’s not us looking up.
Once, I watched my father strike with purpose,
and kill by mistake, like a tornado moving through a trailer-hoe.
I climbed high into a lilac tree, and with a knife
severed flowers of my own.
A story about a minor god,
the redirection of a river,
and the distance between the continents of heaven and hell.
The sun murmurs the spells of what can be shown
but not said,
this is why it loves to watch.