Aretha Franklin, Precious Lord, April 1964

Pastels and paper fans and the Sambo candle fainted into blaze and then Fanny did. Tantrums of ignition and perfect pitch made the morning moan. We know church, we know all about it. The sweat on every forehead catches river esque glints of being sworn in, having taken an oath, no body knows what for.  The reverend is dead but still growing like hair and nails, a grotesque resilience in his song extends his tenure on earth as hers. No one watching is crying but everyone’s rapidly blinking into scissors that wink like owls and whimper like wolves and I want to hear her hunt the owls to sing to the wolves with their cutting eyes— like a pride of lions nudging my banner of nerve, she lends me religion. Will we lose our nerve and return to nature and call that finished assimilation another miracle, and then do it again like wheels and origins. Like a tribe of banshees I call this respectfully faith. Coretta is our best luck in black and red, her beauty is the only kind I trust, tentative, sure, every reluctant glimmer more alluring. Somewhere a family of dolls is stashed in a cave of our letters waiting to be saved. Do you do voodoo too, he asks. Do you?  By now her gloves have choked the stillness out of endings. By now her scream has come up for air swinging. Take my hand.