Sky Cathedral

We the vellum sun tore
          through our mouthless burning teeth—

a lace plum tree among whose
hand-painted torsos

          a beginning broke:

the first man is glass, a
blue arrow points

at shredded apples where snake eyes
& eggs bud embers out the ribs

of his second wife, a slick
          mass entirely seeking a strand to grasp—

you could call it: blotted past, a creased
page bent over smeared margins, but

not the last mirror
          to cut her fingers, simply fresh information—

she felt an edge already
on the other hand—
       electrified garden

wall. A home, an instance
          of shelter in a wet field—

confessing what salamander
descendants understand to be

shoals—how land is nothing
but the sea in exaltation

          lifted away & thrown so high—
a sky cathedral whose cloud

bodies she names with numbers:
          we, her smoky creatures
                    crawling from the waves—