The carpenter is here to build | concrete walls, doors without handles | capital and space, | things of black and white. | Let him alone with his work. | The Burlington Northern train's gone halfway through town | it's more here than you | you're crossing your dark life | I sweep up the smiles heaped in corners | I look out the window & the birds fly | kept in close | still they skirt the rim | on a hot coyote afternoon | my days are relic-filled, | things fall out on top of my head. || Lahoma, the drum is beyond you now | you're gone past years & miles traveling fast | your face wrapped in your red bandanna, | hands, feet, & neck bound by the laundryline | I hear the songs inside your grave   | "le wana henala!  now it is over!" || There's a backbone gone | when God's here  | I stand in front of him | I can't move || Endless lucidities I see: | vault of church nave | stained glass light thrown on faces | smell of sandalwood from the incense burner || (with all my words my silence being one) || I'm shaking, prayerful, thirsty, confessing | out from my soul my naked | and endless trespasses, yet worshipping | the fire in it all || all christmas lights sad on the day of my birth | crying santa claus flying in sleigh, | rudolph rednosed leading over South Dakota & Golgotha | stone rolls back from the tomb | the body cold bound feet & hands | in grave cloths | "Untie him!" but his body | still chilled & stiff | sunken cheeks & ashen eyes || All of this just human construction, | earthbound, wordplay, firefly-lights | in the huge darkness of the road we travel | and as for me: | maybe God is a map & I'm lost in the legend. || Lahoma, give me your mute mouth | I see us both this way: machinery breaking down, | cracks in the ceiling from weight & years settling | doors unscrewing from their jambs | My tongue now broken | "what is in the darkness to imagine into being?" | I am exerting cartoonish force of words on the unknown | even though I have no place doing so. | The word is with God | and not with us.