More on: cleansing

My hair’s pulled back to disguise the grime, though maybe it’s well that I’m unclean, since from dust you came, to dust you will return, the priest recites, smearing my forehead. Once, twice, and I’m marked, a lintel in plague years. I’m invited to kneel and read the fifty-first Psalm, recalling how David watched Bathsheba…

Argyle shat himself and, truth be told, but for the mess of it, the purging was no bad thing for the body corporal. Would that the soul were so thoroughly cleansed, by squatting and grunting supplications. Would that purgatories and damnations could be so quickly doused and recompensed, null and voided in the name of…

Sudden summer rain, warm on your back _____like asperges slashes, more of a blessing than anything to get dolloped in the eye and laugh away _____the shame of believing in any kind of redemptive wash to get to the glass door before the stroup of sky _____spills, to be the chaplain carrying in the far…

I am hollowing a dwelling        in the granite of my heart. I am thinking then to torch       its walls, and sweep out all debris with a green, a heavy branch       of rosemary. I mean to chip a niche inside       therein to rest a…