“Having Read the Holy Spirit’s Wikipedia” by Bruce Beasley (excerpts)

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1.

Glossolalic and disincarnate, interfere
in me, interleave me
and leave me through my breathing: like some third

person conjugation I’ve rewhispered
in a language I keep trying to learn, a tongue
made only of verbs, and all its verbs irregular.

5.

Because doves have no gall bladder
they have come
to stand for mildness. They stand

for You, warble, blue
underwing-flash and quaver, con-
and in-substantial

Squab of the Holy Ghost.
Some Ark’s scraping some
mud-ridged, just-dried Ararat now

inside me, some dove’s
dropped an olive sprig on its bow, meant to stand
once more for the passing of the gall.

7.

Through “spiration” and not “generation” You are said
to proceed, but the question of Who ex-pires You—
Father or Son, or both—has led to a thousand years of anathema and schism.

The Wikipedia on just that question goes twenty pages.
Ungenerative, ungenerated, You’re like me: recessive and proceeding nonetheless, like the wick’s
wax-wet and sizzle as it hardens into self-douse.

9. 

Fricative, constrictive, like a gush
of burnt scrapwood smoke from a neighbor’s yard,
its wintercleared thornbushes and rattlesticks in firepit,

greencrackle and sap-hiss, late March Lent-smoke
ash-smack in back of tongue and eyes, forehead-and-cheek stream of char.
Numinous, pneumatic, Who

bloweth where You listeth, Whom
the world will never know, list to blow
down me.

These are four of the nine sections in “Having Read the Holy Spirit’s Wikipedia” by Bruce Beasley, from Theophobia (BOA Editions, 2012). Reprinted by permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of the publisher.