EXODUS
It’s about flowers burning away virus with their inbreath of the sun.
“Repair Poem”—John Kinsella
There is a certain safety from predator and love
here; no intrusion of the needs and hunger of lovers
lay waiting in dark corners to say “Give me your
hand; feel the percolating waters – do you not
feel it?” The terror of adoration. This flat hermitage,
where every neighbor is a cultivated stranger,
each day with the smile of familiar distance
as if to say to me, “You look like you are generations
from being home.” I have learned to live with
the fast from the chaos of the village, the rituals
and the bloodletting, the sweet guilt-centered sins;
but I can tell that I am suffering for it;
my emaciated soul is hardening in the salt wind.
My friend the poet prayed for flowers to heal me,
and I long for something like this.
AT THE WILDERNESS
The ragged horizon on the outskirts of town
near a stretch of deserted land abandoned
after the foreclosure—acres and acres in—
announces the decline of promise, the great
folly of greed. At the edge of this denuded
stretch are the solitary electric poles,
lined up like the signs of ancient war,
the crucifixes for the traitors – one almost
expects to smell the canker in the air.
Here, the air is brittle, a chemical clear
atmosphere, as if a century has passed
since the great explosion. Here is where
I come to pray – as if I am one driven
out into the wind. My mouth grows
dry quickly. How odd that I expect
the voice in the silence to tell me where
to go. I turn sixty this year. I know
already how it will end; this sugar
in my blood. In this open field, the revelation
is sombering. The sun settles in on my
skin; everything grows dry as eternity.
