27 - At the Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary

They sell dried yellow corn in

fifty cent brown paper sacks

taken past the concrete embankment

on down to fowl pondside, where

goose beaks bicker on

my corn cup palms,

hard plastic tong mouths of need

pinching kernels, me.

I, five, am flushed with an eminent

sense of importance.

We kids learn on these educational trips.

My grain-grown flock would do

anything for cheap gold

magic beans. And I

made them eat off my shoes.

Learn, and repeat.

Back home, my father

would dangle Circus Peanuts

over my head, saying

“Dance like a dog.”

17 - Pentecost

In modest drape of cornflower

crepon, curl-shawled an uncut

crown, the bride of fire stands on

flat soles for her anointing.

Oil-crossed brow like a bullseye

for the Spirit, her uptilt gaze

guides congregant eyes in heliac rising,

so the Son may set on them again.

They robe her in a sweat-silk cloak

of coaxing palms, invoke the Lord of

Pleas, open her throat.  She’ll spread her

lips for tongues of flame and beg.

But this is sober witchery. She utters

incantations, spells a hex on recognition,

mutters nonsense dulcet choruses

they seize as holy kinsong.

In their hot tumult of lit-wick bliss,

her soul is a small cool stone.

She spends them, and she sates them

and she departs unwed, lone

celibate among the saints.

5 - A Kind of Treason

Level-headed.

In that home, poise was a virtue honed through

a sardonic attitude toward the use of books:

The gravitas of classics and

weight of histories were transmuted

farcically into literal gravity,

to calibrate a muscular keenness for

interpreting imbalance,

adjusting response.

Columnar girls,

holding up virgin

tomes, with the straightest spines.

Yes, it was still like that recently.

Who knew this prim tutorial in

feminine comportment—

to help grim sisters stiffly pallbear

their uncracked, funereal lives—

was necessity encrypted, an urgent warning

obscured by its own

comic obsolescence.

The stuff of old films.

Funny and sad.

These days, I bear myself,

an atlas of cryptogeography in

two hands.

I balance the glass orb of my

empty eye,

refracting cartographic distortions

when I tip.

It rolls, and

I scry this crystal ball for direction

but it changes.

My arms have tired of keeping such a fragile balance,

the way a still head

never made me tired.