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You insist
that the world belongs to a stony-hearted goat-god—
how every time we act, we enact
his vileness; how this is no
ecstasy, just a bad labored joke.
Your body in spasm
longs to strip the flesh, but if you do
there will be nothing left but the busy
bone-clatter of tactics.
*
I will listen instead to the river,
cold as time, smelling of blood-brown leaves.
Copyright © 2016 April Bernard. Used with permission of the author.
Of course the tall stringy woman
draped in a crocheted string-shawl
selling single red carnations
coned in newsprint the ones
she got at the cemetery
and resells with a god bless you
for a dollar that same woman
who thirty years ago
was a graduate student
in playwriting who can and will
recite "At the round earth's
imagined corners, blow—"
announces silently amidst her louder
announcements that the experiment
some amateurs mixed of
The cloth edge of certainty has shredded down to this: God and love are real, but very far away. If I go to Istanbul, will I return? That is not one of the permitted questions. When I go to Istanbul, how will I bear to return? I could slip into the small streets to the high plain and the Caucasus— It's all alone, the returning, the going. The cloth, a soft holland whose blocks of blue and lemon once cheered me in a skirt, now dries dishes. God and love are very far away, farther even than the mountains in the east.
You know what I mean: In the instant of waking in bliss, the whole body smiles— He's still alive—She came back—They didn't mean it— We forgive and are forgiven—It all turned out— And then the hand claws the duvet, seized by the real, as all that's warm just drops. I know you know. But I seek a potion to make me dream of the actual with the same fervor, so I'll wake to happy facts: It's spring! It's raining! Robins! Someone will return a phone call today!