Terminal Switching and Previously Published Poems
Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, nothing
but the beginning of terror we can just barely endure

Burger King  an abanoned car wash  Camelot Apartments 
The trip draws ever closer to a close  Brimlit telephone lines
slice limits  over intersections
over streets    until all lines falter

The technological becomes social
some might even say spiritual 
An exalted power stretches about remotely in ways we cannot imagine  an emerging withdrawal   street corner to terminal
the caliper legs converge

we move from one point to the next

Passengers stretch hold of something  Shade shine shade
God waves his beautiful blue rod
Light genuflects before the silver termal’s cobalt windows  tossed moments stop  Space spent and spinning along the tipping-in

and God’s mysteriousness
comes along coming  going

outside the bus
passengers descend
like bright-lit candy tumbling
from a machine
 
Relations come  open
armed  unstirring
the coming arrival 

Light breaks down the machine
and deposits a wave over a blue Nova
Our eyes move toward anything moving
beyond the usefulness and uselessness of prayer

Scattering    dry grass and trash knows the tipping
ebbing  wind  a white 89 Chevrolet Beretta pulls off
far-offness darts outlines a place of coming  every living thing swerved  back
 
behind that Chevy  every time
behind that swerve a Chevy darts

The old man takes my hand and holds it
the way river sand holds
a stone

Goodbye he says
The blue Nova leaves  delivers
a thought after parting
things unfold—never simply

coming  to an end
I see the sky 
Wires strip sky 
Sky strips wire 

I look at the ground 
glass delivers itself up like a full thought
opaque broken glass  Clearly Canadian

Though I am not yet saved
things summon me to hope
in the growing light

Here and now
and in little things I foster the saving power
the Sheetrock on the sidewalk

grey as dusk
dust driven to the eye
brown and iron

and now I see
standing off next to the station

between the broken telephone pole
and desperate grass
a rose has grown over broken glass.

TERMINAL SWITCHING - excerpt


In the beginning,
God created distance—
Nature too, steadfastly aloof:

the bees inside their cells,
a sleeping listless mass,
indisposed to fly out to floodlights.

Day comes, then, and quiescent clusters wake.
One backs out, combs off his head—
scratching for a thought.

Several things agree to pass as one:
The girl’s own body, absconded bees,
Black Mum and Coralbean—

All in bloom
around the glade,
and Opening too:

The honey bee
who brushes the flower’s anther,
with his slender tongue,

so wet, the pollen dampens easily,
moves so quickly as to be
little short of sleight of hand:

With wings extended,
pollen in the hollows of his legs,
he entertains the stem with wry remarks.

Basswood, full bloom, sways
until she feels that she feels,
she feels, she feels.

She cannot shut her eyes,
and tilts inward as if tilting
to a Style, a kind of hell


where bees buzz and matter
burns.  A flower,
she thinks, stays still.

She thinks,
Be numb,
too stupid to ask for love.

Lying, she hardly breathes
and can feel in a full-bodied way
the all-engulfing, demanding dream:

God stretches forth his hand.
Thorns prick His flesh,
for she is sharp without and dark within.

Jesus, in the Garden,
in exceeding sorrow, sweats.
and stops that drop of blood

fallen at her breast.  Not breathing—
too, too intimate to breathe, eyes tight,
nails digging palm:

penance for some black mark
on her soul.  Pain is better
than breathing.

This has nothing to do with me.
This skin isn’t mine; this arm isn’t mine.
I am what you say I am; I am what you want me to be.

Her body has been claimed, yet again,
As though, Mary Magdalene,
exceedingly troubled, had said

May it be to me
as you have said.
Not my will but thine be done.

So, she goes into the light in the sky
where a phoebe swoops to catch a fly.
where, naturally, children roam the inner landscape,

watching dandelions float on the wind.
Nothing can deter or modulate
this beautiful world—

No one in the real world would
blame Moll Flanders
for needing to pretend.

Imagination peels away the skin.
It happens, everything, so fast.
Freud turns over in his grave.

She, too, rolls over like a dog
until she becomes a little god,
crushing indiscriminately

Black Mum and blades of grass,
that prick the kindest like the stitch
or pain that gives a hint and goes.

An hour curls beneath her sleeve.
Still, nothing can deter or slow
this translucent longed-for dream

that shapes the noon-light sky
into a heavenly dove,
so there she is, once again,

caressing her precious dream:
the magic dove that sings
to people in fairy tales.



THE PHILOSOPHY OF MOLL FLANDERS
“The things of Life…began to look with a different Aspect, and quite another Shape, than they did before.”
Moll Flanders—Twelve Years a Whore, and five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother).



Stand as I have stood,
as a boulder in a storm.
No crack
no lightening
nor love
can break you then?

Because you no longer love,
because you are a stone,
let her leave
with nothing
more than what she takes
upon her finger.

So, she says she’ll go down the street.
Randy will take care of her, she says.
When she tries to leave,
throw away the keys.
Throw away all her shoes,
give them to the dog.

Pull her in until she is taut.
She’ll snap when you let go.
She’ll leave naked,
even if it’s raining.
She will walk through mud.
No one will take her in.

In due time, search her out.
Whores insist that you interfere,
that you search desperately for signs:
You will say, I dreamt of you last night.
You lay on the beach, and your skin glimmered
like a lost ring.

Open the truck door like a door of hope.
Buy her from the world
to which she was a slave.
Tell her, sit still in this room.
Two weeks, don’t touch her,
don’t call her name.

This will be your healing time.
No longer speak of the past.
Hold her until she no longer has
a feeling for herself,
until she curls up on the bed,
and stares at Tom and Jerry.

Hold her captive until
the blue-light lead
of the noon day sky
spreads desire,
until her eyes are open
even as she sleeps.

And after this time, go to her like a king,
kiss her so much she cannot breathe.
And when you sleep next to her,
do not dream of virgins
and long for that heavenly place
so far away.

You married a whore
because God needed an example.


HOSEA PREACHES
When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, “Go, take to yourself an adulterous wife and children of unfaithfulness, because the land is guilty of the vilest adultery in departing from the Lord.”—Hosea 1:2