Cruor of Aphrodite. S.A. labs.
Dreams of motility. The bridegroom wakes
and then the bride. Bound overhead from LAX
screaming through the republic’s outworn hubs,
the redeye loses height at 7:03
for Pelham (where “sainted Anne Hutchinson”
lived on the marsh and died of Indians)
and the long turn toward LaGuardia.
Morning comes up, a bickering of sparrows
in the bare ivy runners and a whiff
of kerosene blown from the east. And if
the winter drives into them, croup and claws,
where shall they find their warmth? John Winthrop said,
when Mistress Hutchinson miscarried, that
the botched fetus brought too early to light
“was twenty-seven several lumps of man’s seed
without mixture of anything from the woman,”
by which he meant the monster of her body
proceeded from her mind’s monstrosity,
to think Christ’s righteousness should not find in
her something of an answering righteousness,
amid the high percent of primitive
forms in imagination. So forgive
them if their faith should laugh outright at this,
an angel hammered in titanium
which slams down and rolls shuddering to a halt,
glinting in clotted light. They cannot salt
this witching cloak of ice. O kingdom come.