Hosanna
Rick Hale
Los Angeles, Michelangelo, Jude, peopling the lost souls, tell me now:
Do you remember this eye, this hand, these ears, this
mouth? May I break my solemn invocation with a sneeze?
Forgive me. No bless yous –
my sinuses are cork-tight. No soul will leak tonight. I have Benadryl, Claritin,
Zyrtec. The clerics. They'll not deliver me unto
any Egyptian waters; I haven't yet written my holy litany,
my radiant magnum dopus. Till this,
too many senses deadened by overwork and Melee. Not enough ticks
or tocks. But now I've reached a Beginning. Evening
is here, and I have my two legs, my arms, all the ganglies I need
to stay a peopled sack of water and bones
for at least another 60 years. The angles, the corners of this mouth of ours, the corners
of this usiku-blue room, and even the ones of some other room that
never was or will be, are angels. Laugh not. It's for them I float my holy
basket among these rushes Here, with the hope that
one day the
universe will forget
to contain itself and this
living wave will mush,
glow, cease yes, until
everything is alright
forever and forever
and forever,
and I'll be chanting kunywa siku, to drink the day, hearing myself
say it in my head, out loud with my own mouth, and you'll be knowing fluidly
that it really was alright to think of cell phones as absorbent wonderspeaks,
not the devils of some chalk-faced globalizer's right-angled intentions. This is Heaven
right Now, I told you in my natural tongue, without
words, and hulijua huko (you did not understand that) but still you must
believe me: it's only common magic, the warped light on your
family picture, the children-only frequency of the televisheni (the television) on mute
today as I offered up my djembe prayer, my taking-a-shit prayer, my
nightmare prayer, all to make ready for this current one, this unmapped blue current
of a Hosanna wailed to the floating mind, to the ecstatic descending Dove.
Why this way? What basket? In Egypt, the symbol for "question" is reeds and water.
Rick Hale has work out or almost out through Mud Luscious and Hotel St. George presses, as well as a chapbook, "Pistachio & Iris," forthcoming from Greying Ghost Press. He edits for Cow Heavy Books, Twelve Stories, and Wonderfort.