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Prairie Schooner 78.2 (2004) 160-163



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Four Poems

Children

              long outwardly; others can see it. They desire
so much, even erotically.
So a boy begins to walk across a frozen lake.
There are places in his life, he thinks, that won't support the
      weight.

Though not so much erotically.
He is thinking about moral matters,
the places in his life that don't support the weight
of his need to understand what is right.

He is thinking about moral matters
because of a fight he picked after school.
He needs to understand what is right
given his joy, like a bird taking flight, and his regret

all intermixed during the fight after school.
He tries distractions - a video game, an adventure movie.
He enters the joys and regrets of others, taking flight
from the thrill of blood that had filled his mouth.

The distractions, a video game, an adventure movie,
convince him he must speak to no one
about the taste of blood in his mouth.
It'll be the secret fire that defines me, he thinks.

Convinced he must speak to no one,
he undertakes the construction of a new face,
a shield for this secret fire that defines him,
his demeanor indirect, a sentence that meanders. [End Page 160]

He undertakes the construction of this face
as he would a walk across a frozen lake,
his path meandering, indirect, like a sentence that betrays
no outward longing, so that others won't recognize his desires.

The New Old-Time Religion

for Jon Anderson
He tells the young man to be forgiving, especially
      of himself. High standards? Who can afford them. A swallow
collects a little mud, makes a house, mud-hovel
     stuck under the eave. You don't get good advice
from television or movies anymore, or Grandpop or the corner
     market or even porn mags. Revelation counted
for something once. It's an art form now, and art refuses
     to instruct. When you're messed up, better to have friends
than read a book of poems, he tells the kid. Dogs dig
     in mud to cool their bellies. Hounds are notorious
for this. Beating them does no good. It's practically
     an instinct. And nobody but nobody cares to hear your dreams:
that woozy atmosphere, the architecture, the floors six kinds
     of erotic somehow at different levels - no way to tell it so
folks don't turn away. All over the world they've discovered
     people eating dirt. Depending on where you live it cures
rickets, hives, pleurisy, depression if your potassium's shot
     and you're somewhere in Africa. Might be worth a try,
he tells the kid, because nothing you've ever heard about
     does any good. Get right down on your knees
and with both hands dig into good old Mother Earth
     and eat so you know what you're made of. [End Page 161]

Poem

To begin your life again in the desert in June, the month of light so naked
on whitewashed stuccoed walls their edges against the backdrop of ink-dark
tropical oleanders seem etched by Durer, the air so hot the lungs by 11:00 A.M.
at each in-breath are stunned as children are stunned when told in the midst

of hide-and-seek in the little park across from the library that
their favorite uncle is dead; to begin your life again on a day such as this,
first argue with a dog who is convinced her ball is under the bed,
not lost as you know it is lost, though no waving of your hands before

her stubborn and expectant nose or sustained and emphatic exhortations
in your most plangent voice will suffice to prove to her otherwise. Begin
with a task such as this, a task you know you can't possibly accomplish,
a task which will braid, over time, your love and your frustration

as grape vines braid in the luxurious far away arbors of northern
California or the South of France. A braiding that will lead, upon the...

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