Angel Fire
That day on the mountain, the stones began to speak,
as Christ promised—when he rode into Jerusalem,
and the scribes rebuked the crowd for such
a riot of outcry and song—and it I hushed
them, even the stones would rise up
and sing. The guides told us impending lightning
made the stones chat and clatter, clacking
in that meadow, at 14,000 feet, the rocks
shifting restlessly, shivering against one
another, tapping one another into sound,
in the gathering embrace of an electrical
storm. If our hair should rise into a sudden halo,
we should fall to our knees upon the ground.
But lightning isn't born of the nimbus. The stones sing
because electricity is rising from the earth—fingers
of invisible light, unseen streamers, rising
out of everything that is. So Job called down
the whirlwind, and in Michelangelo's painting,
it's Adam, lactescent and supine
who lifts his hand and summons God to earth.
So in the beginning, a pulse must have reached out
of the primordial ooze, out of the stumps
and stubs of chemical compounds, calling
down the spark from heaven—the bolt
that would transform their static ladders
into fluid DNA. The flare of desire, the jolt
of becoming always rises out of the earth.
Widow's Mite
...he observed the crowd putting money into the collection box...one
poor widow came and put in two small copper coins worth a few cents.
He called his disciples over and told them: "I want you to observe that
this poor widow contributed more than all the others...They gave from
their surplus wealth, but she gave from her want, all that she had to
live on."
Mark 12, 41-44
Whatever, the clerk says as she hands me the receipt,
and I don't know if she means whatever
I saved today at So-Lo, or the smell of blood
that she can't lotion away, leaking out
of the plastic-wrapped slabs of chicken,
or, perhaps, the impossibility of ever calling
anyone by his or her true name, or whatever
makes her reach out to pinch the shoulder
of the broom-pushing high school boy
until he cries out, What? What do you want?
and she confesses, Just to pinch someone.
She keeps dipping her hands into a bucket
of diluted bleach as if like Pilate she could
wash away the cost of the accounting,
for, in truth, in this marketplace, we are all
counting the small change of our being:
the Vietnam vet in his battle fatigues
who keeps weighing his wallet against
the price of bits and the ends of bacon
and two packages of red calf liver,
the teenage mother balancing a bag of chips
and a bottle of soda against milk and bread,
the widow digging in her purse for her last mite,
so many souls with broken zippers, trying
to shrug off the cost of this dearest of Sundays.
The Price of Books
I bent my back
to carry through all the cities
of Spain, up the hotel steps—
where the loaves of bread
from the bakery were waiting
every morning in their hot, crisp, crusts—
the dictionary of the Real Academia. As I carried it,
I heard whistling the whips of the flagellants
scourging themselves into Easter,
words of orthodoxy cockleburring
the flesh of my back, thorned,
by hook or crook to be transplanted, syllables
exact as bullhead or bee sting. Libros
that are not libres, even though, sometimes,
they languish, jacketless, torn,
on bargain tables, beneath the flags
outside Georgetown University,
or in the damp basement
of Salt of the Earth. For thirty-nine cents—
the bounty a pair of magepie wings
bought in Wyoming in 1968—the sacred
manuscript of every indigenous people is remaindered
in a cardboard box. For thirty-nine cents, I carried the Huarochiri
manuscript home, a walking Andes of words, weaving
the suspension bridges of its myths across the white ravine
that swallowed the black llama and the heavenly fox,
written by those who knew they were vanishing
into cities where they would stand on corners
as beggars and be mistaken for mutes.
Books stapled together like wings, books like
the three perfect red leaves in which a child finds
the spine of her natal hour. Books possessed
by the flies of heaven, by the song of a sarcophagus,
by the face of that man crumpled
over a grate, by the soft thumping
of a moth caught in a screen of light,
by a kiss caught in a net
of hair. Books of the bulldozed
orchard where one or two surviving stumps
put forth a leaf, a branch. A book, alive, that dreams
of a world in a park in Madrid, flowering
with carnival tents, food booths, Peruvian musicians,
a splash of bitters tossed into a glass, people wandering
back and forth among the leaves of nothing
but books.
Seraphim
Even houseflies must have their angels.
Principalities, at knee or elbow, the voice
of God caught within an ear, at such a pitch,
it makes the skull hum. And if I swat them,
can they blame me? Like all good messengers,
they're just testing whether we are still alive.
By such means, the priest taught me, God creates—
all the living and the dead, just a nursery
for his hatching. So when I found a trinity
of maggots in the abdominal wall
of a living kitten, though I had to pinch
them out, I could not blame them—Shadrach,
Meshach, Abednego, pale witnesses
of a homesick God, caught in the furnace
of the flesh, hoping to sprout wings.
Proviso
Pyrus Malus—an evil fire?—burning
in the branches, perhaps, of a primitive
species of crab-apple, cultivated
in all temperate zones into so many
varieties: the apple of discord
awarded to the fairest (in beauty
not justice) who caused the burning of Troy,
the apple of Sodom that Josephus
claimed dissolved into smoke and ashes
when grasped by a traveler's hand,
Adam's apple, the apple of love,
the apple of the eye, the Apple John
said to be perfect only when shriveled,
any number of erroneous fruits, any
disappointing thing. "Faith (as you say)
there's small choice in rotten apples" or
"
Feed an enemy the skin of a peach,
a friend the skin of an apple." But tree
of knowledge or morning snack, you can have
the gala skin, the blush of the apple,
even the white succulent flesh, if you save
me the core—that earthly constellation
usually tossed to horses or thrown away.
I'll be with the gypsies who cut to the star
of seeds at the heart of each orb, for
it's the core I want—intensely apple,
medicinal with a dash of arsenic, the zing
of earth, the crisp bite of becoming.
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