The sign of the cross
on the body makes a circle
on the body, an earth
with mind of north and heart of south
the origin point of hands,
each shoulder ball, at east
and west, as the work
of hands, God’s work
originates at a distance
from them, light from a sun
that rises and sets, we pray,
along one ecliptic— God’s will.
The sign of the cross
makes a wheel upon the heart,
mind, and origin of hands
on each crossed body
in the world, that each disparate
person might be carried through
the day on the same unchanging
center, the dove of peace,
God’s love, whose forms
recklessly, carnevalesquely,
evolutionarily extend from and
converge in
that love’s rest and that love’s
turning… a clock of hours in which
midnight falls to dawn,
and the works of hands
rise and fall in the quadrants
of the gentle hours. At night
the sign of the cross on the body
sinks, a mineral deepening of hours,
into the body— forehead, skull-line,
spine, clavicle—and comes to rest
inside the body, slowly
turning on the sternum’s crux,
not shadow but shafts of bone
moonlight being thrown from a gnomon
of being, at rest in the body’s heart.
At night the body recomposes itself
along its skeletal legend
of direction, as sleep rounds
the center— which was given—
in its northings and southings of night.