to pluck
a renegade bud or
puckered potato already
on the verge of rot.
A toxic black walnut
tree stands sentinel
at the leaning gate,
dropping its dark
grenades into the field’s
jumbled stalks. Two
squirrels quarrel over
which one should
command this wasted
circle first, the entire
acre fat on my neglect.
THE FORCE OF COMPASSION
Sit with things and listen long
and the singing will begin.
Turn your free fall into
a voluntary act. The song
shattered, every being
takes its piece of the harmony.
The well of the past is bottomless
and in the walls the song climbs
out of the nets and jewels of time,
the infinite unraveling mingled
with bitter intervals of radiance,
well water, lotus heart, rising crane.
THE HOUSE OF DANCE AND FEATHERS
You got to roll with it, or else you’ll roll
under it, says the piano player, roiling
the air with arpeggios. The genius is in
the second line, the one entranced and
in thrall to the drum, where the fierceness
of the soil is made manifest, its black mass
loosened by the rhythm of the water roots.
If Heaven is the place where nothing ever
happens, then the stomp and pomp takes
place elsewhere. Horses fear bridges
because of their binocular vision. Unable
to see straight in front of them, their
survival instincts have fashioned a 180
degree panorama in their peripheral scope,
with two realities constantly in play, like
the whale heads hanging on either side
of the Pequod’s stern, whom Melville
named Kant and Locke; our perception
is only narrowed when our brain feels
threatened. In Antelope Canyon, on
Navajo Land, Heaven is slotted in
the sandstone, and gossamer beams
of light compete with the waterfalls
to frame a vision of life after death.
The Crack and the Corkscrew spiral
out of the layered earth tones like a
pair of Dante’s hellish circles, where
painters and mathematicians spar with
sediment for the symmetrical spoils,
though sometimes the occasional flash
flood will claim a tourist or two.
In Heaven, to whom does one confess?
And when does Death show his face?
Perhaps there the water is made of silk,
and the substance washing around you
is called Grace. Seven white coroner’s
sheets covered seven unarmed black
men, who were killed by white police
this week in America, and each of the
deceased’s mother or wife believed
their beloved was in a Gucci stall being
fitted for wings. Every policemen thinks,
there but for the Grace of God go I.
Does the Governor of Heaven care about
the color of the murderers? Is there a
great slide, shaped like a bell curve, that
drops the unworthy straight into Hell?
Or streets paved with gold, diamond
Jacob’s Ladders, leading the freshly
christened cherubs on escalators into
the segregated first class seats?
On Earth as it is in Heaven, says the
solemn congregation, where the lion
lives in harmony with the lamb.
Awake for five straight days, eating
speed and drinking tequila, Mickey
Newbury swore to me that he’d
seen Jesus, and how did he know?
Had to be Him, said Mickey, He had
on an eggshell robe with the letters JC
monogrammed on the breast pocket.
When 4-year-old Colton Burpo told his
father, Pastor Todd, that he had visited
Heaven while having his appendix
removed, he had sat in JC’s lap and
summoned
