After the ambulances

FAITH

Faith, that boogey-word of this boogey-age
with all its tricked out apocalypse
and all its gleeful dissembling, faith,
come now to mean slightly more than
pained concentration, but only slightly more,
faith. Maybe my fascination,
my long penance, my secular flirtations,
comes from a born taste for
fried okra and fried catfish
scooped from the riverbed’s latrine murk
and fried cobs of corn
battered before being lobbed in grease
and fried anything. Maybe
I want to believe, even in Baptist
theocracies which demand
all sin be committed in airport bathrooms
or rest stops abandoned
by the state, consigned to Dante’s shade,
maybe I want to want
to want. To never stop.
I think I have said that before.
To every woman who in her mind agreed
to wake to a tandem disappointment
beside me, to knuckle sleep
from her green-flecked eyes
and fall through her clothes
away from me, to every one of them
I spoke, somehow, of faith,
and even by the strength of her ribs
swear a fealty to her
or that moment or mess
or whatever we made of things.
It is hard to live happy
with one’s couch and dead microwave,
with one’s brick wall,
with one’s spinning class, its twill of irony,
when one learns how
the Pope is verified to have testicles,
no woman or eunuch
or genetic klutz. Latin I can’t recall
but it includes cupping
and a kind of vouchsafing
for his pendulous netherness
and all night long I could not sleep,
hating books, hating the Vatican, you can imagine
why.