Transfiguration refigured

I am very humbly grateful that this poem was included among the top 50 of the Poetic Asides April challenge . Thanks Robert! Reprinted here from the April 17th "Big Picture" prompt (with some corrections)



Transfiguration refigured

Fighting sleep in the blinding light
the first thing to do is make tents?
Peter runs off, grabs goat skins
and ropes and while the cloud
is trying to encompass
them, God trying to be heard,
the disciples are busy hoisting
and raising as if it could be contained.
But the dazzling brightness
keeps blazing through,
burning holes in the goat skin,
brightness not stopping
God still shouting
and nothing stops it all
from disappearing,
going back to normal
so that everyone wonders
whether any of it really happened,
except now there’s a piece of charred goat skin.

Centuries later, it's a fragment of tapestry,
the face of love gazing out into the cathedral
until it shimmies off as a spider,
spins out to become a spiral galaxy;
the face had only been holding its breath
wincing in the flashbulbs of our folly.