For Bach and Buxtehude, Dancing at Heaven's Organ

(“Oh I’ll leap up. Who pulls me down?”—
“Doctor Faustus,” by Christopher Marlowe)

Now can I join this dance?
See, I am thinner than vacuum.
I can kneel toward the sun
at the very angle of prayer
and feel the counterpoint
pulse through my veins.

I could leap so high
this globe would be a speck
in their choral hurricane,
this music an immense verb of sky
where the sun soars
through a fugue of cloud.

Abraham is here and David,
Hildegard with her angel voices,
my neighbor hymning the morning
at her clothesline, even the sparrow
that woke me one December dawn
singing as if it were summer.