Blood falls through his body
like a pocketful of keys tossed
into the middle of the sea.
Having dreamt last night of entering
the green cave to hurl his grandfather’s
psalms & keys into the cave’s deepest
wells, the sound of the keys, as he
shook them in the cave’s face,
served to vivify the cave’s holiness.
Blood falls through his body
like a stream of tiny black flies
that pour from the dead tree
with a lightning strike scar that runs
the trunk’s length. He thinks of
lightning which requires its converse
to be fully seen, requires an absence of light.