That’s what there is to say about salvation:
it’s impossibly laborious.
How can anyone penetrate the impenetrable—
break from this world to that, and feel the touch
of even the shadow of divine light? No one has explained
that very well. All seems mere prescription

of do this; do not do that. Prescriptions
cannot lead to salvation.
They aren’t even satisfying explanations,
temporary fixes that, in the end, leave you to labor
over what was wrong originally. What of the loving touch
of another human? Couldn’t that pierce all that is impenetrable,

if not in the most hardened, then at least in a nearly impenetrable
soul? Many have taken pure indulgence as prescription
for the afflictions of this world. Sure, some go a touch
too far, some further. But who’s to say groping at salvation
like that is wrong. It’s not exactly laborious,
all that carousing and chaos without reason or explanation

other than … Exactly, that’s it. There needn’t be explanation,
long as it all amounts to some blind, mad stab at the impenetrable,
the impossible. And being saved doesn’t have to be laborious,
does it? Who’s to say labor isn’t just another prescription
against the allusiveness of salvation.
But at the same time, that no one can touch

enough flesh, be touched enough by it, is clear. But touched,
why can’t the word alone be sufficient explanation?
Was there not a time when it as an epithet was salvation,
a guaranteed place in the otherwise impenetrable
other world? But that too has become false prescription,
which puts us back where we started, with labor,

which remains, well, laborious,
and leaves us to this life, longing for the touch
of the thing itself, the absent Provider-of-the-Scripture-and-Son,
who is all, and at once, without explanation …
the impenetrable,
which, if it were otherwise, would be salvation,

without need for explanation,
no longer impenetrable,
a fiction … and salvation.