Allegory

When you play upon your forte, knees wobble, dust clears, and the behemoth strides out. Like the red outline of beginning Adam as he emerged from paradise, it fills in with gradual deliberation, fastened to the nascent body. Enormous obelisk, all wrecking and lawless, we believe in nothing now but our own disbelief. We wait for a comeuppance. Whomsoever shall enter without being broken.

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Uprose color, the candor of which lessened, until underneath revealed Argentine skin, pubescence along the belly, what might have been mistaken for fruit. This body. This journey around what might have been had we not eaten. And now the hand holds it aloft for all to see. My wayward and lost antique, my never-ending. How the pleasure boat was found, gutted among rocks, its hood up.

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Parable

We exhume bone, whose white machinery allow for grief. Part of what we take is wan, the other, not of a leaden hue, but rising through the lymph pool, ruddy-like, provokes. In your eventual eclipse, someone else fills the outline, becomes more suggestive, is mistaken for the whole. Completion was encouraged: the body roused its appendages, the prayers reached their end, and all obeyed the wonted signal of this great potentate.

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How marginal the lakeside, the best part of your body. How like a headlight it shone out of the spume and spindrift. But no head, only body. It could have been the declarative nature of the dogwood blossom that stayed us, the heavy breathing its petals induced. We were told not to let it happen again. Now, the reversal of such a burden. The soul leading the body. The soul pulling the body.

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