Praise Nothing: Poems

Heaven As Nothing but Distance

Heaven As Nothing but Distance Maybe it was enough to believe the zodiac’s blazing entirety would be cast from the sky, an effortless handful of salt scattered to the Kansas plains’ red wheat. OutWest, souls every day were shedding their earthly inheritance—the refused histories of cause and effect, blight, hunger with a trace of Santa Fe Railway coal dusting grocers’ displays— and so my grandfather, too, who, having leftTopeka for Los Angeles’ early sprawl, exits the train station’s dim into day’s white flash and takes one step onto his upturned apple crate. A new Bible in his palm, he begins to explain why all things are fire, what it is that makes you ache awake. Once, on a gritty city beach in California, with flies,  stinking strands of rotting kelp, styrofoam, he and I sat watching a gull choir first eyeball, then swoop, then peck, almost in unison, something tangled in a blue tarp washed in above the tide’s pull. A drowning victim, maybe. A vagrant. And though we were unable to see what was there, when he put his hand in mine I could not even begin to count all the things I wished to believe in. And that is how it would be if what I remembered was as true as the waves landing, but now there is only the lungless hot breath of L.A. on my cheek, the cries of gulls, their wings ruffling into flight.The night after his memorial, someone dug a hole into Kansas silt loam, dropped into it the plastic baggie with his ashen remains. Nothing then but distance in every direction. Above us, a satellite’s beacon begged the horizon for home, the heavens’ scales measured the darkness, and that was all.  ...