EDWARD LOCKE
Vertical Reach
Before Asoka,
Earlier than Gilgamesh's loss,
Before the birch of Eden catkin'd,
One out-of-moment axletree,
Like a quill
In a hubristic scriptorium, designed
Upper
as heaven, gods, holism, health,
Lower
as fallen, devil, evil, villain.
When sapiens came,
The skyward-looking tossed noun grenades.
They brush-fired their roots into reverence
And shattered the vatic
privatesf
into
priest
And, like smoke
Of after-sex cigarettes, their princes rose
Screened from the slang of death, and wafted
Toward precious buds their bodacious prayer.
Till comes through
A summer of such fecklessness,
Such inner shepherding fleeing
Winter and its brutally barycentric frost,
Isaac can follow
Circuitous butterflies in sightline
Baring black-rimmed orange, and in the rims, pale eyes,
And whose flights, for who can read,
Autograph in air
The Hebrew name of what they land on next.
So Abraham, watching Isaac aleph-mouthed,
With a voice now a silence of four wings,
Drops his knife
To the root of a wild olive. He gapes
At the rlligration from treetops of a thousand monarchs
Intuitively flashing downward, blazing into a scrubby bush.
