Lumen

Your path,
you think,
is a dry straw
driven through the earthly garden,
a straw through which you are drawn
from desert to desert
by the sucking breath of God,
and that dim lumen
a midnight alley
through the middle of a block of the Tenderloin,
into which a bar fan blows jazz and smoke and beer,
a warm breeze heavy
with the smell of estrus and durian,
with the cries of monkeys and toucans,
with communion in Lao and Mandarin and Quechua.