Before Bezalel's hands graced
and blessed each acacia pine,
I was in their shadow, feeding
off the day's twilight, 
my mouth coarse as summer nights,
my words none,
I spoke through palm touching palm,
when I was still halved before the acacia shade.

The low tide days mounted each
inconsequential cloudy covenant
and brought it here, thus,
Man stood tall-spined in the 
centre of the galactic sinkhole,
yet I was but wind amongst the reeds of Egypt,
so could do nothing with the weight of
airy promises sealed in the moonlight's
sparsity and the dark starry ribbons
that cloaked them, I set about by day,
to find my death in the acacia shade.

All afternoons burned thirty three
degrees through the mountain scalps,
I felt them open tombs in my lungs,
Sinai's hairs shedded, leukemic,
that holiness embedded within
the stone's matrices thieved by
lowly gusts of broken and maimed tongues,
they have encompassed them all,
I was intruder in the clear day,
but I sought resurrection in the acacia shade.

Theirs is psalmic union, silence
their gift and their offering, 
I become one with the rocks, felt flesh become
air and air sink through the rock like
deflated geyser smoke, Hineini, Hineini,
these groves, the vineyards of the Lord,
I sleep eternal life across the shade.

Dusk turned all the acacia tips purple lined,
regal to wash the feet of Jesus in the sky,
paralysed to songless worship,
I was epicentre in the dust of creation
crying out for a physician of the soul,
the day fell lengthwise, became two snakes
entwined with two wings on the world axis,
Asclepius' rod the pillar of earthly creation,
the trees shook like the name of Mikha'el,
Who is like God?
Perhaps the artisan of this acacia shade.

New arks wreathed into laurels of
liquid shadow, new confessions amongst the
dark birds' migratory rhythm,
fleeing eastward, they diffuse through
the gates of heaven, passing as smoke
and shade through these concentric firmaments,
their beaks agape, their wings broaden
as they sail the skies of the eigth heaven,
they cast forms through the acacia shade.

Empyrean thrones spill their food,
I find the kingdom of God in the
synclinal corridors that bend to
Christ's wounded palms, always feeding
these birds full with manna eternal, 
the emerald hoopoe heading this conference, 
vessels gliding to the dark ridged shoulders
of Persia, where a bird that 
never was and never is awaits them,
all this I see a million years away, in acacia shade.

My church is the broken body,
the wounded wine,
I wake and smell Bezalel's palms
have been at work here, new light
comets through this shade, I stand
heliocentric, palm to palm with my shadow,
around man all the planets orbit,
fill my ark of acacia flesh 
with the maelstroms of my many shadows,
God makes me whole, the greatest carpenter,
and every pound of flesh His philosopher's stone,
the sky's jigsaw is whole again, the ark,
magnetic, drifts through the black void of time 
and I with it, out of the acacia shade.