A prescience, a presence of sure weight tallied
against lucent pinpricks that seem the afterlife, a
          rosy golden chamber made of weight: the body
steadies in hard obit and shameless music.
          There are ashes in the raindrops. Let there be thanks
that we live under water, that you can taste
          my blood for miles, through calendars of rain.
Sit across from my body and tell it jokes,
          not joke-jokes but stories, the sort where misfortune
rehearses mercy, and it is good for a king
          to be glum. He remembers his streams excited by carp,         
tacking without tire. He will marry, and far
          from growing familiar with deer that paint the valley
beholds a new gift when they are gone.

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This poem began with considering that a star, such as the sun, imparts gravity or figuratively "weight" to a body. I wanted to notice a more nuanced connection between stars and people than the trope of saying we come from them. Further I wanted to press the sonnet form to handle the titular topic of "Parousia," that is, a divine presence, and concomitantly say something true about "bodily presence."