vaneramos | Agnus Dei

Soccer field by the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Guelph, May 29

In shadows you hear it swing rhythmically in the wind. A gate? A swing? Voices string along dark alleys of the city, a call to prayer. With turbulent strokes an orchestra stirs out of sleep. Lives mutter at the approach of another dawn. Finally the Baptist cries across the prickling skyline. Agnus Dei, Lamb of God. He’s raising you to light your candle with a million pinpricks against blackened night until the whole curtain flashes with a new wind. Altogether you murmur now, a crowd; in your loins an agony rising for escape, until you realize what he’s going to do. He is summoning one inevitable orgasmic flood on the horizon. You see the rays spread. And then every symphonic note you ever heard from Bach to Mahler explodes in sunlight on the meadow, day crying in your child eyes. But where Gustav would set you mercifully back in the embrace of despair, Rufus holds you ever aloft toward a buoyancy on light. Dismissed at last, you can never live the same life because of that gentle breath.

Qui tollis peccata mundi
Agnus dei
Agnus dei
Qui tollis peccata mundi
Dona nobis pacem
Dona nobis pacem
pacem
Dona nobis pacem

[I pulled over the side of the road near Ridgetown on April 28 to do a free write while listening to the song by Rufus Wainwright. This is a revised version.]