Reverences we save for the flesh

Mistaken For God

I have been mistaken for God in the dark. In bending reverences we save for the flesh, I have often been deified while panes sweated under the nuclear weight of breath. Venga mi rey, I once heard. Jesus, you’re good, in confessory black. Oh God, oh God, when advent was imminent.

I was often tempted to scout the room, the back seat, the open meadow for another presence, but the parting of seas kept me pegging the red and drawn toward their deep hosannas. I have seen goddesses in the light, felt their eager worships when candles surrendered their wicked rays, prostrated before the congealed shapes of their supple dawn temples.

And I have tendered offerings in the translation of my tongues, inscribed along their fertile gates the wet psalms of my devotion. I have affirmed oaths and temporal allegiances, foresworn poverty for the honor of high service, vowed and recanted for the delicate manna of heavening kisses.

I have been mistaken for God in the dark. In altars of embrace, I have ascended Olympus by the prayer of a woman’s touch. She has placed me there. She, all the shes that have been She, has made of me a transubstantive emblem of desire, by token blood and backborne bread have I been encrucified and lifted up, beyond Babel and glass, above immortal and marble, Titan and Almighty,

Horae and the hundred-handed. The air is faint at these heights, so am I given to drink from her lips the very skies that would save me. Should you encounter me in such a place, see to it that incense and bright wax shepherd my stay for it is a lonely station and nothing is there more brief than a god on his throne.

Nothing.

Joseph Gallo
July 11, 2006