Faith is something I hold in the reliquary
of my mouth, rolling it with my tongue,
mindful of its potsherd frailty, certain instead
of concrete memories of the bear, vivid
despite the space of years nested away
like field mice within the ossature of time,
or rather what was a bear but now hung flensed
and naked beneath the pale cotton eye
of an autumn sun in my twelfth year, its body
slung from a pine, braided rope pulling
against the gambrel with the sound of nails
wrenched from gray timber, its forelegs
outstretched so much like a man, flayed head
thrown back in howling outrage, the frieze
of a fevered dream, marbled muscle drying,
revolving against a legion of salacious rumors,
one of which coupled it forever to the hunter
through a rifled bore, or perhaps the bear
was an anchorite imploring intercession
at the nave of that ruinous church,
which was not a church but Grandpa’s resort,
where a crowd of sportsmen in checked wool
passed whiskey from a common bottle and joked
about the bear’s penis, which lay pale with dust
beneath its body, while high above clouds
scudded past like miasmas of chalk smeared
from a board, and as I recall the air was
heavy with acorn mast, and deep into that
moonless night I awoke from visions
of papier mâché skulls and something animal
inside me ripped loose, a broken suture
left to darn my derelict trust.