Vows

You said I want to be married.
You said I want to be married

to you. You said We were children
together. Who better?

You said I moved for you once
already. You said I need this.

You said It will be quick.
Backyard. July. My mother

will cook, my brother will DJ.
Here’s the date. Here’s the phone.

You said There is so much
to do: spray the bushes

with repellent, bind
these sunflowers with twine.

Hack this stump down
to a hollow, fill it with stone.

Here. Standing in July,
in the backyard, reciting the words

you wrote in ballpoint
on a scrap of ruled paper. Here

I am. And slowly, as if
emerging from a long sleep,

and looking around,
and confusing myself

for the cufflinks, the hushed
crowd, the white tent

billowing like a sail – I take
your hand. I start to speak.

- Edgar Kunz, from “Tap Out”

Among the Prophets

In town, they say my daddy been possessed by the spirit of King
Saul—the simmering rage that makes him cuff me over Christian
radio, curse me for his cirrhotic gut. He plays the game of
uproar. Writes midnight checks to televangelists, smashes the
homosexual television, buys my mama a gold necklace & then rips
it from her neck. The controlling spirit. The use you up & throw
you away ghost. With a spear, he pins our household to the wall.
My mama stops telling what the neighbors done when he raises his
fist, calls her those terrible names. She believes him & I should talk
back but I never talkback. I am his fortune-teller, a cautious
gnostic with a serpent’s tongue, to praise & to spit on. Smart
daughter & shoulda been a son. Weren’t Samuel the teacher of
Rasputin? I lie because my prayers are too treasonous to claim.
Daddy you a just ruler, Daddy you so brave, Daddy, yes, we’d be
dead without you, we’d be dead on the street like rats, yes, we is
like rats exactly. I seen an army fall before, & in the end it was the
rats who swallowed every last gilded thread on their bodies &
chewed up the bodies, too. Come Judgment, the littlest is the
largest. Knowing all the ways to poison a king, I hold an empty
cup, soothsay & wait for a man to rise up in the shadow of this
second giant & make me his thousandth concubine. What I was
raised for, daughter of the bootstrap king with the taste of dust still
in my mouth. Every gum-snapping girl is a prophet, the waitress
after hours with hands on her hips, the wadded dollar bills a tarot.
Come Judgment, I know how it will happen. When the townsfolk
wanted a leader, Saul—domineering, cunning, powerful—seemed
like an all-right choice. Powerful in a powerless town, almost a
blessing, almost the word of the Lord. Yes, he is a good king,
how the K.K.K. chopped my daddy’s wood for him, winter, 1968—
damned if they’d see a white boy freeze.

- Essy Stone (from The New Yorker)

From "Human Archipelago" (2018)

With a lamp in the blaze of daylight I seek out the work of God in real time.

These far-fetched words unfurl into those who do the work of God in real time.

If I were another on the road I would do the work of God in real time.

In this age of noise and sorrow, what greater privilege than to do the work of God in real time?

The horse waits but the rider is nowhere to be found. Who then shall do the work of God in real time?

Many are the godless, my friends, many are the disregarded who do the work of God in real time.

My memory is lit by remembered lightning: a ghazal to the work of God in real time.

- Teju Cole

From the book HUMAN ARCHIPELAGO, his collaboration with photographer Fazal Sheikh (https://steidl.de/Books/Human-Archipelago-0613454851.html)

Barcelona: Implication

The Constellations are a harmoniously composed series of 23 gouaches that Miró painted to escape the trauma of the war years.
— The Joan Miró Foundation

We’ve all gouached.
Haven’t we? Pollock lashed
stretched canvas that was Nude.
Was said to call his Ruth prude
and he spat chew in a coffee can
and shat bloodily in the can.

When I was twenty I spent three
hours in a room with the Free-
Spirited Types moving from
one inviting orifice to the welcome
of another. I was lost in my wood,
savage and stern. But also I understood
that when it was later and I was wiser
I could never forgive Herr Pfizer.

My father said we’ve all got an East River.
He had a tenuous web of veins for a liver.
His loss. Literally. Mom’s impatient art
was proved to be the most effective part
of her mothering: you should see her rich greens
well up in the power of the middle and grow lean
as they colonize the crusted edges.
My love for her is impregnable.

Pity Miró, moonblind, weary on the rocky coast
of Portugal, walking cliff paths and getting lost.
His quest for childish wonder has bent him
and riddled his skin before its time.
Put this together with that! Paint it yellow!
Murk the sky with banks of Periwinkle and Snow.
Gouache a widened eye low on the right,
so it can behold the left and the night.

- Noah Warren


Journey of the Magi

‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling and running away, and wanting their liquor and women
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.


Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt.
I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

- T.S. Eliot