padre populates an amen corner

The hand that stays his drinking must be his.
When he shakes it with his other they appear
to him as hip epiphanies that whiz
upon a slack wire strung from ear to ear
inside his head.  "I should have left the beer,"
the Padre says, amazed by how his tongue
trips, as it were, upon the bottom rung
of a Jacob's ladder angels now descend
to wrestle and then best him, and then bung
him in a barrel where he says, "Amen."