Aceldama

I

“Who is my mother?”

All those galaxies ago, where I burned and practiced the cold flame

and mined the mirrored ore of apexes from

quantum peaks and wordless defiles,

I never had a name, because just when I think I know anything I am

reminded of doubt, and because I am reminded of doubt,

I must consider it as a possibility, because if God is one

for whom all things are possible, then of course it would follow, the

impossible sits in the palm of His hand, along with all possible

worlds and outcomes, beginnings, and maps to beginnings,

next even, to I myself, the trembling and blink of the not-yet-fledgling,

just pecked out from its shell. Is that my mother’s

voice I hear, calling or cawing?

I try to translate, but it is, after all, only sound, and in this emergence,

still contained in my own context, I can only hope

to agree with outside meanings. What if instead of Live,

she means Die? Or if “Come here, my love” means go to Hell? It seems

that her mouth moves, but her words are the gestures

of one flailing in an agony of departure, of a fear of severance

from all that is possible and good, of sickness in Fact,

and I, still damp and not having yet accumulated other choices with

which to compare, begin to gesture back, in the same

muted tones of fury cocooned in helplessness, a smile

being the first beseeching plea.

II

God says nothing, as fathers often do, but holds me there in His palm,

along with all that is impossible, and so, of course, I swoon,

believing this motion is time, and begin to feel the pull of it,

Newton’s apple falling from Eve’s hand, and enter the world of recondite

splendours, powered at the very least by clocks, placing one

inside my body, and picking up its cadence with my feet.

Soon, I am ravenously hungry, and the frigid air begins to warm, parading

in sheets like tasseled mirage, and I step out on my first quest, the

quest for Sustenance.

III

She was a surrogate, from whose body I hatched, and I starved on through

my youth, suckling finally in my late adolescence on

that verdant acclivity sometimes found by the grievous,

its approach being so discreetly occluded by Hope that most of the well-

meaning continue on their level ground, tilted, as it were,

by the phenomenon of aspiration, believing all the while

that they, in fact, ascend. Alas, poor Yoricks.

So it was that I was nursed, with the effervescing milk of Rare Fortune,

by a green and growing hillside, a tawny hillock in fall~

the alternate breasts I turned upon to take my fill

and I listened to the singing of her lullaby of bees and cockle shells,

her amaranth sighs and muguet bells, and then her swaying treefulls

of golden leaves, their rasp a fairer comfort than the punctuated

expectation, those sudden telegrams which increase rather than interrupt

such silence as my birdlegs, these animated twigs,

seem muffled within.

This rustling became a peaceful reassurance, like the white hems of motherly

underskirts after twilight, brushing softly the bedlinens,

leaning their rosemilk aroma over snoozing innocents

to outen wee nightlights,

to tuck, at last, the babes with prayers to see them through the dark, like notes

in a wailing wall, vast and black as night; mothers, all, eventually,

named Mary and mantled in steep blue myth, crowned

with the narrowest and most breathtaking spires of gold, set with philosophers’

stones, which initiates know as perfections of circles, revealed only

by the tips, the convergence of angles, of the great cornerstone.

IV

O Christ! Thou Instance of vertical flights, your moment a transmundane eternity

hidden in plain sight.

Raja Manna!

I raise my sandwiches to you, stain my lips with your wine! How my heart beats

its weird joy, delighted in its gilded cage, preening and warbling

along about the lilies of the fields, but for your gentle mercy,

Aceldamas, all.

My cocked head and my bird eyes, black as space to the blue between, spend the

day wondering if my perch swings me, or if I, by my weight

and movement, make it swing, for when I light upon it, it moves,

and I am fascinated, almost proud.

A·cel·da·ma ¹ (ə-sěl'də-mə)

In the New Testament, a potter's field near Jerusalem purchased by the Jewish priests as a burial ground for strangers with the reward that Judas Iscariot had received for betraying Jesus and had later returned to them.

Aceldama, lit. "place of bloodshed," from Gk. Akeldama, from an Aramaic phrase akin to Syr. haqal dema "the field of blood."