American Jericho
I walked around the hospital six times
and still the bricks did not fall, and still
no one came to ask if I would like to come in.
Though I prayed, and though I walked
around the hospital six times more and still
the doors did not open, and the bricks
did not fall, and my grandfather
probably laid those bricks
sixty years ago, and still I cannot enter. Once,
I walked six times around his buried bones
in reverse and he was not reassembled
out of the earth, not returned to me
or my blood circling always inside me, music
through the trumpets outside Jericho,
and the darkness blown out
of them, as if to shout me too down
to rubble. I walked around the hospital
twelve times and still the bricks did not fall,
and only dust gathered in my throat, and still
no one came to ask if I would like to come in,
though I looked each shift change in the eye,
though it was below freezing, even as the sun
began to rustle out of the concrete.
If we are each a city of sin then
this pulse rattling inside me is just a clock
counting down. A single note blown forever
until it isn't, that is. Until the river dries.
There is a bible verse in which the people
circle a city until it falls to the ground.
There is a bible verse in which the blood
circles inside the body until the body falls
dead in the street. I know, I wrote it.
It is comprised of my dead friends,
and all their memory. Let me read to you now
from the Book of Stephen. The Book of Jay,
the Book of Don, of Susan, of Big Bob and Sean,
let me read to you in the pitch of bricks being laid
by my dead grandfather and his dead hands
as he builds a hospital his grandson cannot afford
to enter. I will tell you the story of each grain of dust
washed from his back until his own body was washed out
along with the water into the earth. Twenty-eight years,
and each day I’m this close to opening the kingdom of dirt,
and this day I'm walking around the hospital at two am-
because I think I am dying and want to be
dead-then three, then four am. How American,
all this fear. This trembling ground.