Daniel Fitzpatrick

The altar boys’ smoke break in photographs

Those wings carve terror from the gates

of our painted paradise, screaming unmoved

down the endless air of our empyrean,

Who—Who—Who—Is As He.

Ululeia, ululeia, chant the fallen

in the frigid perfection of their will,

their coral lips creaking 

on the vapor of their voices

like crows on their cries in the morning cold.

And his newborn eyes are coals,

and he kisses his cigarette,

swallowing his flaming sword

to thicken incense in the darkness of the temple,

to pause and sigh again what’s gone unsaid 

since there was what once was not.

And the burning tip flickers

like a bull in the cool of a cave

as they gather countless on the Godhead,

stepping from their cyclone to smoke,

to stare dead into the open eye, unseen.

Daniel Fitzpatrick is the resident poet at the New Orleans Museum of Art. He teaches English at Jesuit High School in New Orleans, where he lives with his wife and four children.