—brother b’s roman sojourn—

Brother B gathered his locks, bound
them with a tie at the back of his head.
The ponytail made his head a horse’s
ass
he proclaimed. He’d gone on a trip
and just gotten back. The place he’d
been he called Rum. . . Next we knew
he
said he came out of a Capuchin crypt,
Brother Bone of late, a bite of sound’s im-
position on the air. A bite of sound’s
phi-
losophic insistence, he said. A philo-
sophic bone recital, he said, bent on
giving one pause. A philharmonic non-
sonance, he said, gave him pause. . . The
pony-
tail, he repeated, made his head a horse’s
ass. Don’t say that, we begged, hit by
wisdom’s idiocy, the wisdom of the idiots
his.
We’d begun to be won over, a demonic
or a divine cartoon we were in, so quick
it made our heads twist off. A two-headed
eagle
had us hoodoo’d, he said, a bite of sound
on the air Nub’s ancestry, Nub’s predecessor
address. . . Once again, he said, the call was
to
love our captors, love them though we did
and got nothing, offer up another cheek. He
was talking out of his head but we heard him,
his