A Farmer & His Bible

My cats have settled
and sleep in a dark leg of turf
beneath our household trees
where rain, a day ago ran
—efferent ways that ravine
divine effluence
as might a grave one day.

Where my wife goes
there is a well that waters
the sunflower, and a river
that waters the well, and a sea
failing the Son of God.
Out from the soil-swell her flowers
are fatal, aflamed, ascendant, like Jerusalem
in the day of David

Upon the generant hills
my animals crowd a way
in the fragrant rain, and the dogs sing
of flowers to the south, of streams
running deep into the sea.
Beneath an arc of dissembled light
they follow down the seams of covenant
where in my cats dream.

Brother of my heart
has left for the tree-wicks of pine
and the desert air.  His thousand years
have come and gone, and now a thousand more.
God of our wells, God of our seas
when may your lightning
assemble again the insensible degrees
of Promise—of red to violet, to cleave, to fire
to fall these household trees?