The source of the poem below is:
http://www.poems.com/holymvoo.htm
The Holy Men of Jersey
By the audible vaudeville of laundry lines,
where the breath of the godhead snaps
bedsheets and girdles, they are called —
thin men —
to the brink
of miracle, to lift light as fog
off their unmown lawns,
to enter
the million-winged midsummer drone in the trees.
The holy men of Jersey ghost
the curtains. Bodiless
as instinct, their thoughts turnpike deep,
deep, where it's brainless and pure
medulla, primal and ancient doom.
They sleep late. Their day jobs grow
cold. They turn in their collars, they levitate
in cellars, they take up nightwork as janitors
instead. Ponderous, clear, they grow
hardly there they are so
pure, wrapped in the evangelical
tentacles of —
what?
What claims their naked bodies as they give up house and car,
as they contemplate the calculus of crows
on the lawn? In the black gestalt that quivers, rises:
they see Shiva, Vishnu, the oilslick arms
of a preaching Jesus,
and the holy men steal away —
strangers.
Their children, grown up, can't put foot
before foot for the holy
tracks them down:
God's
in their coffee cups,
in the chemical spring of their bodies,
in the cities of their bones,
burns blue and luminous, miraculous
as a gas fire raging through
rain.
They never look up.
At any moment, the sky will open
and the birds will pick them clean.
-- Sharmila Voorakkara
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