Trisagion

i.
Hallelujah is a cold sweat and you
are afraid of God,
afraid of salt pillars, afraid of floods

and Heaven is afraid of angels,
angels with wings torn out,
and it is afraid of Gabriel, afraid
his next command will only taste like

ii.
Ash in your mouth and you,
you chant in Latin and
Greek and Aramaic and Hebrew and Arabic,
as if the tongues God spoke will untie yours,
but you have forgotten the vocabulary and

God has too, lost in movements,
movements of the celestial spheres,
faster than the eye can see,
the eye takes it in as stationary

because in the beginning there was Chaos but
before there was Change there was the fear
of Change and

the eye is stationary like the eyes
of the doves that will fall from the sky,
from the crystal sky
to the hill, the plains, the meadow named

iii.
When the Covenant wasn’t a year old and you
looked into the ark and were blinded,
blindness like looking into the sun,
the sun holy

only to heathens;
though this story is mostly about death,

the prophets have already written about Heaven
where the angels are burning the Trisagion

iv.
Sung still, the voices gather and you
stand still in the chamber of the Seraphim

where everything is named one name
and the name is the Word and the Word is

of no use when the Word is fire
and it razes the meadows from your mind
into Heaven above, Hell below, and

Purgatory like Earth, Purgatory like cold
or heat or rain or sun, especially sun
on the day the song ends

v.
The sky is crystal and you
are afraid of the pull on your skin, the pull like
a noose tying you to Heaven
and to Eden where the Fruit still grows,
Eden which if it fell would be Tel Megiddo
and the fruits of its labor would be you

laid prostrate to humanity which itself is a pull,
a pull on your neck which you cannot reach
because in Heaven somewhere your hands
are glued together

vi.
By Grace there is salvation and you
pray more than five times a day
because this world is not as real as the World
to Come, and the Second Coming

will be the day you wake
for that day will be the day of glory,
the day of the Word and the words
hallelujah and amen and remember

vii.
There is no God but God and you
are forced a smile, you are forced
awake in the glow of your halo

marking you a saint, the letters
at the beginning of Creation, the letters
written from prisons and to dictators
the letters distort like laws,
they distort when you write them and accidentally

God says you have become,
“You have become as one of us”

viii.
In your exaltation you sting and you
burn the crucifixes, the symbol
written on your skin is bleeding and

the pages of the Book are wet
for Moses held it in the river
where the Commandments were blurred,
no longer the weight of gold,
no longer the weight of the world,

but the weight of feathers,
which is greater then gold,
as every angel knows, as every angel knows

ix.
The World to Come is far and you
have taken the ashes to ashes and
dusted off the Book of Job,

where the pain in the Word itself means the Word
and the Word is the World where you
will resurrect, or

would resurrect if the sin were not so original,
the sin you named as you,

but everything is named one name

and the Name is the Word and the Word is God.