I used to be in your church.  And I still call
the colors I saw in your tinted glass
elegant, spouting their filtered lines
of soft light. But red and blue made me tired.
I missed the blends of grey you left
out, blends full of light and dark of the spectrum's frame.

And in sermons you always framed
the death of a pet or a stab of beauty as calling
for only one emotion. I left
thinking of the pet's burial sand ground into tinted glass
and of that beauty as tread on one's tires,
when an artist's face is bent by moneyless lines.

You see, artists and books don't line
up as events; culture flows like an interrelated frame,
a net that bridges every thread, never tiring
or ceasing. But with religious thirst you always called
your Flower of the Desert sacrificial, to be in a glass
apart from His worms and soil in your left

hand, a Lamb pulled from the earth and darkly left
to fade in dust floating in those colored lines
of tint in your churches. From behind such glasses--
 in simple life in the West--the horizon frames
causality, but I hear the echo of human calls
 beyond the event horizon in the spokes of a universal tire;

and it’s beautiful how I see the air flow and never tire
when I displace it, as I mold the pillow under my left
cheek falling into my nap. Nothing calls
itself alone in forests, in oceans, in trees lined
with dens, or in tall grasses flaming with frames
of sunlight; only you want us alone under glass.

And nothing for me has tires that never caress the lines
of roads others have left; you, mistakenly alone, would frame
me confused now when I call my arm an extension of the glass.