His Beatrice

with memory encoded in muscle,

there are mystic saints who desire

inseparable assaults of satiety and hunger

while lost in prayerful longing to speak beyond

the luke-warm language of daily discourse,

shaking everything out of nothing

as if to devour eternity through

some slow immersion into the art of loss,

like Dante's Purgatorio, shadowy prefaces

to a heart cracked wide open,

by bestowing greatness with a grace that

decentres the self in exactly six cantos,

that unselfs one self with imagination

set loose and escaping time

on the wings of an angel