Praise Nothing: Poems

Passing Paradise

Passing Paradise Like a man blindfolded and asked to kneel who cannot hear the bolt strike the cartridge after it enters the chamber, its click like classroom chalk breaking on black slate, a sound small but definite: one stone kicked up against the curb, a pocketknife shut, a finger snapped. So, what then of the old Romanian sweeping the strip-mall theater’s sidewalk, for whom heaven has become nothing but an age-dulled marquee gone unlit for years, its one Paradiso meant to entrance whomever drives past and happens to look up? I saw a film once in which a wealthy man moved all he owned into his parlor. Each morning, he fired two rounds into the pile and, finding it all still there, returned to sleep beneath a thin blanket on the lacquered hardwood of his indoor bowling lane. It’s not easy to remember when we first began to loathe irony. South of Bucharest and beside the ditch banks and bare hills, the soaked  fields’ sheen, where no one is asking if History is yet up off its knees, powerful men have reproducedTV’s Dallas ranch.Weekend getaways for sale. Even Larry Hagman’s been there.When he arrives, the executioner carries the rifle indifferently, swings it like a broom.  ...