Quf: ק

Fucked art thou, with luck, o reader within the palace within the palette within the impatience within, who tilts his letters into the light of the mind’s muttering unto itself, releasing their sounds to the whirlpool fierce of an ear to draw creations in—

Who brings forth a kiss of circumference, the glyphs hooked and loosened and linking, as though they were dancing through moths of minutes and months like wind—out of a god whose name is Gone ...

Fukkit and lukky art thou in the wind moving marjoram into the mint, the fuzz and down of the former grazing the raised ribs of the other, the essences borne—

Pheromones suddenly wafting, your eye catching the gradient greens and vein-like patterns, the gray stubble of sage’s tongue, thick oregano’s glister and whorl, stalks of thyme spiking the air on a kitchen porch or Sikinos slope with its lavender flower, lit up, still, in June;

The blue film of night’s end rolling into white near dawn, the light by which you know a friend, the ancients explain, from six feet off—or, a wolf from a dog;

The glow of morning bougainvillea, its papery bracts in a breeze like prayer, its bezeled ruby beginnings morphing into pinks- and magentas-to-come, cream-tipped corollas on perfect display, style and stigma sheathing the anther;

Then creeping Christians’ dusky luster, in the shade at noon;

Almonds swelling jade drupes into the sinking summer, encoding spring’s initial explosion;

Pomegranate’s garnet, pendant, containing—against the green of its arch and stretch—six hundred seeds dark with light, glinting in its skin;

Fucked, art thou, and lucky, who translates it into the day as blessed—

So blessèd as in blasted art thou, in a way, in whom this knowing is strengthened in bringing you down to the cords of arthritic knees, 
wrestling the gust of a given moment’s giving—like vapor—and strangely grateful;

Blessèd art thou whose petitions are curses, whose fuck touches the innermost chamber, waking the king and queen in their slumber;

Blessèd the consonants funneling vowels,

In Scripture’s offering—a dove’s neck wrung, cakes unleavened and mingled with oil;

Blessèd the spirit’s meniscus within a letter typed or scrawled, as not-quite-deciphered codes of soul—

A pupil’s reaching through a sentence, slipping and reaching again, and again, a teacher tracing the shape of her thinking;

Blessèd even the stink and politic rot of the day’s pronouncements on high, Liver of the blaspheming Jew, gall of goat, and slips of yew—

in action as Evil: the concrete Lego-like bunker and tower, bunker and tower, barbwired cabbage and vines, shadows gliding as crows fly across the road to the holy of hills and prefab huts, from which goat-like thugs emerge, watching and then descending through a glowering slope-stepping prance, tribal fringes trailing—their dance sick with a stiffened faith, wicking and blotching their map of state, like a cancered scan, eating away at its language and letters, as Gone yields goon, or gun, or bone, where lips meet and part in the “b” of all that’s brutal and also insidious, pointed to and taken on, in the maybe pointless battle—

Evoking the hundred blessings the rabbis say need to be uttered daily, reading the number—me’ah (hundred)—into the word for what, or mah: “What does Becoming your God ask of you?” (Deuteronomy, 10:12);

And blessèd is never quite knowing, exactly, what those blessings should be.