Good Book

Always, these last six months,
the terrified atheist,
I turned to the dictionary
for solace,
imagined bedding down upon
a latticework of definitions,
the warm leathery tang
of maths and sockets.

I let it fall
open at a random page.
That's how
revelation is done.

From coromandel,
a fine-grained, greyish-brown ebony
streaked with black,
I traced a finger
down page-cracked archives,
discovered a gaellic funeral song,
coronach,
with its whiff of wet moss,
a coronagraph, blocking
light from the sun's peach fuzz skin,
then bustling past coronary,
calorific coronation chicken,
coroner,
but finding only corporal punishment,
corporatism.

I lingered in corporeality,
watching plasma chimneys set ships
aglow like witches' candles
'The corposants! the corposants!' -
and this might be so much corprolalia,
but then,
o then it was corpses
and corpulence,
with abnormal enlargement of the right
side of the heart (or cor pulmonale).

Thank God for correction fluid.