The Dictums of What

Expiate comes from the Latin expiat— “appeased by sacrifice,” from ex ‘out,’ and piare, from pius ‘pious.’ In the late 16th century “expiate” bore the sense of suffering to the full one’s rage until one reached the end of sorrow. What imagination—what twin vision of faith—believes in finality when happiness has been as much an omission of detail as a transference of detail from perception to the imperceptible? Why does transcendence hide in its authority to dress a wound of knowledge a loss of all knowing? Words are translators of detail, estranging us from our roots. Sheltering in its sound a motion’s desire for its object, a transitive verb spits out the cause for atonement. One finds themselves locked outside a house of worship clad in broad-shouldered stone, contours of stained-glass burning a gaze through the splintered confines of one face. Angels sing, bow, clamber up one another, rewriting their spines in amber-ridden cavities above a lush and ageless forehead of hill. Dimpled ropes of lead lining fallow blanks of blue tighten around a white palm. Treading a fiery cheek of crimson, light gasps, and through lipless glass a breath of amethyst escapes. To have faith announces oneself to no one: abandon whims the mind imitates as its own on the grounds of the soul. Abandon the self, the self is; again, the self is, and I have not yet abandoned the world. Where, my soul? I have forfeited the dictums of what. I confuse the soul and mind in their union, their love unknown to me; I cannot read the emotion of words. All my staring up the night-sinking finish of a spire leads to a sanctuary that never was.

At night the potholes spew a fattened steam. A piebald belly rises, loosens its grip on passersby’s feet, runs up along their absence in wisps. Two girls with painted faces wait at the crosswalk. One curls her toes around the edge of the curb; the other, already on the street, glances at the green light as a taxi rushes past, then turns away from a wandering hand of fog. Blackened shards float beneath a white grid of glass above them, a stubbled chin rolled out like paint along a new tower of babel. Red light. A black man in a grey cotton tank-top and black shorts dips his head down with a music hurling into him beyond the hearing of his strangers as he lifts his heel. Across us a white man with dirty-blonde hair in a white dress shirt and grey pants sweeps his foot out towards us, his eyes tap-dancing above our heads. I walked these streets once looking for the eyes of the homeless when I still thought my role as a witness was a key, my look a rogue origin of love. A boy runs up to the closed-face of a stranger, the whites of his eyes clean, the copper irises shining so strongly through perfect stamps of black. My heart turns. Something new, under the sun, his eyes say in jest. The two girls run past the two men.