When Greg ran electrical wire through the walls

he never imagined the despondency

a place could come to know.

A paltry collection plate.

Purple stains blearing the cement floors.

The worshippers–a meager constituency–

casting the ballots of their prayers.

How the halls once rang with the hard freight of their voices.

A trip to Africa, thirteen souls won over,

inviting into themselves death of flesh

and resurrection of the soul.

Had they squandered the ceremony?

Stomped larkspur, purple-blue petals like wet receipts,

requisite for the faith they shed

for an indivisible law.

Even then, Greg wore a buffalo gun on his hip.

His lapel turned against the wind

but bearing colors of his love of country.

Jade and opal bruised his chest

where the kick left its mark

after he took that woman to the river.

Along the gravel bars they cast off their clothes

and in the silt of the river found crawdad claws and dead minnows.

They found in the unkempt banks

a hollow, a stone, a dead tree

on which a wasting raconteur might rest his head

unfolding for her a bullet at a time the turns

of his undulating faith, a faith that could tear holes

through stump, cloud, decorum all alike.

They drug him before the elder board after the affair.

They called him Hitler of Madison County, turning

the minds of the youth

and he couldn’t stop laughing.

His wide grin, that cradle of iniquity.

Castigated, cast out, Greg’s shadow

no longer slanting the back row.

Back home Greg sends bullet after bullet into the sky.

Who isn’t a martyr for love?

If he aims just right

he might wing a turkey vulture.

Its squawking might turn in such velocity

to a wonky note of praise.

Having never known angel song

he lifts his gun to his eye

the entire breadth of sky

shrunk to the end of his barrel.