The Revivalist’s Announcements

In a darkened closet
costumes hang limp
in a community of silence
as if guarded, a crowded cell
of renounced capacity
to conceal & construe.

Across town, beneath her revivalist tent
a woman evangelized,
lamented the forgotten & the forgetting.
"Treacherous ploys of the ordinary"
she cried.

The geneticist had once bought her a black dress
with moon sequins & dangerous sandbar hemlines.
Self-articulating when she wore it, he recalled,
Her body filled it with belief,
shape of the bestial & wise

Now she wept,
called out his name with those of other lost souls,
railed against empty conveyances
asleep in small dark rooms.
"Save yourself"
& fought against his ruthless programs.

Each February
he recaptures his zephyr,
swollen with prizes of color & shape.
Dons silk shirt with banded collar
& jade hexagonal buttons
to tango with the fair
rescuer of the damned
& press into the brilliance of the sequins
& the tide of her hem.

(c) dark 13 February 1998