Litany for the Remainder

Say it again. Say it again. Say it until the saying wears a groove in the dark, until the groove becomes a road, the road a rut, the rut a grave that fits you like a coat.

Again. Again. The word is not the bread. Again. Again. The bread is not the mouth. The mouth is a door that opens on a door that opens on a hunger going south.

Count the liars. Count the priests. Count the ones who sold you infinity by the pound, who proved on paper you were provable then billed you for the hole where you weren't found.

Count them. Count them. Let the counting be the only heaven anyone is owed — a number swelling toward a number, never arriving, like a lover on the road.

There is a mail that moves beneath the mail, a horn that only sounds when no one hears; your name is on a list inside a list kept by a clerk who has been dead for years.

I have divided myself by my desire and carry what is left of me: the rest, the stubborn remainder no one wants, the crumb that falls outside the perfect nest.

At night it grows. It wants what bodies want. It presses up against the whole like proof against a theorem sleeping in her bed, and the theorem moans, and shingles slide from the roof.

Meanwhile the old voice through the wall: You'll eat. You'll wash your hands. You'll thank me when I'm gone. Desire and guilt split the estate between them; the body pays the taxes on its own.

Say it. The room is waiting for a guest who is always almost, always on his way, whose messenger arrives instead each dusk — small, apologetic, nothing much to say.

Nothing to be done, and so we do it. We do the nothing thoroughly, with skill. We polish it. We pass it back and forth. It shines now. It could pass now for a will.

And the learned voice runs on without a breath, given the existence the existence the existence of a personal quaquaqua outside of time who loves us dearly with some exceptions —

stop him. Someone stop him. Take his hat. Under the hat the engine chants its chant: zero, one, zero, one, amen, amen, I am the loop that cannot say I can't.

Say it again until the saying breaks, until the breaking is a kind of tune, until the tune is all the god there is — a boot, a hat, a tree, a bone-white moon.

And still the tally runs. And still the flesh keys its warm sum into the freezing air. No one is coming. Set another bowl. The rope's too short. The tree can wait. We stay: two zeros leaning close — not equal, no — rounding each other upward anyway.