Mister Sunday,, and: Wasps in Winter, and: Wild Onion

Mister Sunday, and: Wasps in Winter, and: Wild Onion

Mister Sunday,

the librarian, says god god
is good               god is good
and loves him               god is good and loves me

and he writes the due dates over and over
January January January 15 15 15
on the back flap of the books,
though once he wrote
forever. forever forever forever
written on top of one another, cloud-
word: forever,
the ink, dead black,
like a stamp, a human stamp, carved in
gravestone.

Pink rabbit, his tongue peeps
from the corner of his mouth,
and Mister Sunday thinks:
I swallow only on the good thoughts
so the good thoughts are in me,
I swallow thinking no death and
god is good,

and I don't step on no crack
in the mother, in the pavement
and I spit in my hands and rub them
til they're sore all over, for mother
is unwell,

please god, love me, though death gets in
just a little bit, sometimes when I breathe in
bus exhaust, or vendor smoke. How can you help it
when death is everywhere, just a little bit,
and god, who will have mercy
on this meek kingdom of men?

Wasps in Winter

Maybe they have fled
in vee-formation.
Maybe they have wrapped themselves
in shallow breath, and gone far
into themselves.

They are faithless women.
They have built around
themselves this drab cloud-prison
to live in.

They are cloistered
forever. They mutter and kiss
the stone of their chambers.
They doubt and take vows

of silence. It is sick the way
their palace hardens, swell
of many cells,
it remains long after the tree

has gone, leaving pieces
of itself, revealing its darker
heart, there all along,
but hidden.

Bag full of ghost.
Piece of mother, her intentions
clear. I do not know
its mind.

Wild Onion

All that is dumb
can bloom
in the mind,
can flower, be fire,
can open and spore—
wildly—
and so fly back
to its beginnings
in spring—
a profligate weeping,
a dampness of ground—
and so enter each pore
of our house

the way I enter it
once more:

I see my father clearly
in the room he blacks
from daylight, turning slowly
ghostly, with an illness

no one sees. Must've been deep
in the dirt of him, waiting
its green time.
So, too, am I full of his love

for oblivion, it wakes
in me
with the barb and sting
of wild onion,

its return in the warm,
the air full
of plenty, this bounty from nowhere,
a blessing unasked for.

No ground is fallow,
nor lawn—in that dirt-filled sky, chance pearls
moons of many skins. The minutes tick
and mindless, the urge
to shoot, to scatter and spore
kind and kindred let loose in the world,

as if they had heading,
as if they had purpose,
this issue spurred forward to flower
in any dark ground.

Bloom and swarm, bloom and swarm,
the reasonless legions
of weeds arrive,

no matter how far they have got
to travel,
no matter how blind
the seed.