Hallelujah!

Praise the lord, Im all but levitating
the way my hair rises up in the electric air.

Santa Ana winds pour down from the canyon
like a wave of ecstatic ions
twisting into a nimbus behind my head.  

I put my palms close together and blue light 
leaps between them, a magnetic storm
between two small poles.  

When I handed the homeless man with a sign
hungry, please have mercy
a ten dollar bill he held it up to the light

and when he blessed me with his one good tooth
I took his God bless you into my one good eye
and felt it travel to my pineal gland

(once thought the pebble size home of the soul)
felt it settle there among the melatonin
before it entered the Book of Giving.

My father, Parkinsonian in his easy chair,
sits slack jawed and wet lipped, drooling a little,
looking almost startled into reverie

looking for all the world like hes about to say
something portentous, looking like John the Revelator 
and I say Hallelujah!  Inside his body 

one hundred trillion cells have befriended him 
and before long they too will rise
into the radiant air and my father will fold himself

over rooftop and sidewalk and praise the lord
may I feel him, make my hair stand on end!


 

© Jan Lee Ande