Caught Up

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John the Beloved considers the Rapture 

Word buckler, chary tribe, 
inured lamb, 

stumped in your cinderblock den, you attempt
to draw up my life—the puns latent 

in your knuckles, your shoulders bowed 
in perpetual commencement, 

though we have never met 
at the crossroad of years, you will not 

dispense with wondering about the unknown
mountains. Since your teenage grief, 

you’ve heard anecdotes dismounting 
the disappearances from cars and vans, 

the story twisters passed from cousin 
to mother-in-law and back through the lattice 

of a friend of a friend of a friend 
whose name has been forgotten. 

You’d ask, “What are they doing now?” 
yet querying through to the speculative, 

for you, is another name for foolish. 
You want to know and don’t want to know, 

you are repelled and attracted 
by the old natter, the unhatched myth. Yet 

I want you to recognize me 
even in the surgical winter, a prison 

newly rent, this pit recast into a bare-boned 
sanctuary. Yes, I’ve shadowed by 

you and your kind, worn something akin 
to your collars, a meandering trail 

of nighttime water, another fleeing 
forebear charged with new blood, 

now firm with the yearly weather 
of disguising and allaying, 

confirming and bearing out 
in due course the unadorned into the cloud 

and downpour of unspeakable things. 
Will you meet us there, too? 

Beholding the basins and farms, 
ridgetop of the vineyard’s last stand, 

waiting for rending and uplift, 
the gusts of ocean, breath and fire.