Free Sophia by Michael Bible Page A

think of you when I fly.
    It is midnight but could be morning. Eli, I’ve wrung my hands a good bit and gazed at my navel far too long. Up there in the clouds I will see the enemy and raise him one.
    Do you really need to do this, you ask. Couldn’t you just rent a helicopter?
    There are many things I could and couldn’t do, I say.
    You know how this story ends.
    No one knows how the story ends, I say. Just where they left off reading.
    St. Kirk is hung from a lamppost in the waning hours of Palm Sunday as church bells toll the wrong hour. His feet are tied together with barbed wire and his eyes are pecked at by sick crows. His Hawaiian shirt is torn half off. His mother washes the blood from his feet with warm milk.
    I take to the sky with my improvised wings. I am above the buildings and the parks full of dying leaves, van Gogh yellowsand Gauguin reds. Listen here, Eli. I’ve got nothing on my mind as I mix things up from one thousand feet. My heart is an avalanche of possible things. I see Cataract driving in the sunlight laughing. I see the grey girl and the white waves lapping at her feet. The Holy Ghost sits on her face and takes the Freedom Tower in her mouth.
    Might you come down a moment, you say, Eli. You have a child forthcoming.
    I’m awakened from my flight.
    You are a sweet man, says Darling. Her dark eyes are full of the promise of the world to never end.
    Agape, agape, she says. The greatest of these is love.
    I fall into the East River and no one bats an eye.
    An envelope with my name left by the door. In it a square of black paper. It is winter, strange.
    Darling and I walk through the nightly confusion, the red buildings and blue windows. Throngs of literate people in this city, even the man picking up cans reads Dostoevsky. In the skylights of million-dollar townhouses you can see the planes crossing above you like there is no ceiling. When you’re rich, things are easy and the food is better but your soul is rotten. Serve only one master, says Christ. Eye of a needle, all that. But then again—take off your clothes, Eli, and feel how nice these high thread count sheets feel in this strangely unguarded townhouse.
    We are maddening in the neighborhood. A film crew on the street, a show about spoiled children. Eli, you go over and scream until they give us a hundred bucks to go away.
    I have a vision of Cataract and Nono at a local greengrocers in some hippie Carolina village.
    Get in the car, says Cataract to Nono.
    I need kale twice a day or my bowels get funky, she says.
    There’s no time for kale, says Cataract. Bounty’s worth at least six fucking figures.
    You don’t have to curse, says Nono.
    Cataract licks his finger to test the direction of the wind.
    Yes I do, he says.
    Darling and I snuggle in the January snow. We’ve rigged up camouflage around our bed, nicely hidden—bunnies in a briar patch. There comes forth a vision. Cataract exits his ’87 Oldsmobile wood-paneled van and scopes the city. He breathes his smoke on me. I wake to a single blade of lightning.
    Two old ladies smoke long cigarettes and sing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” on the F train. Hasidic families with Hasidic babies pray to the Hasidic god. A homeless girl kicks a drink machine. Somewhere in the Middle East a war just started over a bottle rocket and a wink to the wrong girl. My mind is full of past.
    We wake up early in the East Village, where all the good poets died. We go to our boat parked on Fourteenth. Eli, I will grab us bagels. A few coffees, black. Darling and I read the Sunday paper and relax. We are aboard our vessel minding the business that is rightfully ours. I am very much high on narcotics when this woman calls to us. A parking cop. A cartoon of a woman.
    This ya boat, she says.
    Lovely Rita meter maid, I say.
    This ya boat, asshole, she says.
    Yes, Rita. I am her captain, yes, I say.
    You gotta a license? I’m gonna run these plates.
    Ten minutes and cops have surrounded the boat. We are