MISSOULA EULOGY, LUNAR PERIGEE, GREAT FALLS REVELATION

Where in sweet Hades is Jesus when He’s needed
most, I wish I’d had the huevos
profane enough to pray like an anarchist
archangel with arms
crossboned over my ruffled brisket,
over my scarred heart thumping from the pulpit
of my first, and goddamned last, First Presbyterian
church packed to the rafters with sadness
exacting its tangible red
lava lamp of viscous roil—slow-
motion amoeboid agony writhing just as I,
terrified by grade school catechism,
imagined souls suffering in molten hell
behind fireproof glass.
                                   I acquiesced. I did  
as I was asked. I piously recited to the mournful
my poetry from the pretty Good Book
According To Zarzyski—chapter nonexistent,
page-you-name-it, verse whatever-
the-unreligious-hell. After the last shot-glass toast,
I drove pie-eyed into the solstice
moon looming closer, closer—God
on a Harley hog—tipped
both visors down to cut the glare
off black ice, fought
the Monte Carlo’s steering
wheel pulling hard
left as if beckoned by the light
of the oncoming. 
                          Thanks, but no thanks,
to my gymnastic grip and crapulous
migraine that kept me penitentially thinking right, right,
right up to the moment I revved
into the garage and out of the Stones’ crescendoed
Sympathy for the Devil, I made it safely home
sweet home.
                    Pressing the Chevy’s heavy hood above my head,
I wept, at long last, for my friend, as I witnessed the radiant
halo lathed deep into the sagged steering shaft
rubbing against the frame with each dip,
swale, swerve in my s-curved life
of straight-away fate—the twice-blessed
luck of a bucking-horse-rider, minus
that one wrong bronc, of a timber-faller,
minus that one rotted snag, of a brash
sad traveler, minus that one sharp 
turn-too-many into the dark.            

                    
                                            In memory of Jake Woirhaye