Revelation 18:2
When kingship descends again from heaven
I will be there. This is not a love
song, darling, nor a legal doom and this
is no honest prayer. But if
These lips slip perjuries as
impious kisses, the sun
will tinder me an idol—glowing
and unspeakably scarred, palms
held open to cup at silent fire. This just sun—
a mere halo of your immutability,
a slick gold halo grazing my unveiled
scowl with coin-bright heat. And darling,
I am so tired of hanging,
suspended in this putrid state of grace,
unspeaking—my lungs held open
to heated decay, the fleshy pathways soft
and excised, old air hardening like
lucite in its pink-tissue crypt. My voice
curling feebly, the smoke
of some careless sacrifice. A spangled sky
plays at extispicy with my crimson
gurgle of unreason— the altar
scraped clean, purged white of
bloodied semantics. This gut-violet congeal,
darling, once had spelled your decline.
I don’t love you
as the sun loves the land, with wanton
lawfulness, or like the Tigris
paws dumbly at the barley bank. I love
you like a knife loves the torture
made by ritual sacrosanct like the
measured palm-by-palm becoming
of some fresh canal like my entreaties
scattering mote-like when the gods
veil their brilliant faces like a
swill of water to wash out a god’s
mouth, tasting of cold granite. I love you
with the distance the dead
keep from the living, like dirty silk
brushes the brow of a mourner
bowing down. I love you like the wrenching
of a dagger toward the condemned,
clean bright strokes drawing blood
from one who shed the blood—this
too is your justice. My gaze falls
on your inane perfection like how
language is fed to child-scribes on
tablets still moist and impressible like
how beasts of the unkempt valleys
comprehend the godhead. And I part
my lips just slightly, pretending
at penitence. I love you like the young
love a dynasty, already knowing
your daylit throne will dust and tumble
too. When night crawls in (O, how strange
it is to praise you) the fairest
sun is downed. I’ll hand your shadow
then to the hungry risen clouds.
Lucia Tang
