Infernal glow. Scarlet ellipse mid-drift
in the still-swelling snow / shock of blood
in a milky eye. Here, things go to shit

in predictable ways. Ways we love,
until we don’t. Until they don’t. Jude,
her arms obscured in tendril’d sleeves

of flame, in ink & iconography,
tends. Here, everyone & -thing is linked:
as kith, thick w/ kin. The candles, briefly,

an order. They make of morning a fin,
a folly. They’re kindred. They kindle.
They let the hagiography begin.