Excerpt from The Two Standards
The Garden
After the fall we struggled with mutability used our muscles poorly Never remembered Adam’s name for the first giraffe. It was all a bestial blur. We got caught up, tied down in real estate. Mine was the Eden Bay: a place in the row with new appliances high ceilings carpets wall to wall. Had it been a garden certainly there must have been hydrangeas turning colors in the shade Runners of clematis feeling a way along Instead of the gravelled dust its groveling Still falling to the zero landscape down Taking inventory every minute of the day another naming of another animal Its dull matriculation into fact. *************************************************** Commentary I. Dark and the days disgrace themselves line up like barefoot sharecroppers for moldy seed take what they can get. What gives them the right to grin without teeth shift legs in the useless southern heat? Who gave them their rusty guns, said: “Shoot anything that moves, wound anything that breathes”? “Gotta eat,” they say, “gotta have some fun.” Dark and the days amass heavy without rain dry heaving day on day. II. This account which logs the disgrace of the dark days in a tone which falters between two hard silences, that which precedes and that next which is inevitable, will help no one. As a record, though, it does succeed with journalistic knack in capturing the workaday of pain. Also the patient detailing of death and death-in-life, is worthy of remark and is achieved with clean integrity. Events are not haphazardly strewn; horrors are linked. Hell is consistently conveyed. It is not, per se, a pinching exposé, though there are moments of titillation which in a work of this kind can’t be avoided. Read it. Read it again. It will take your mind off things twice. III. Dark and the one eyewitness strains across the sand her listless fingers trace. What pattern in the endless grain corresponds to that stunted skeleton? What true word sits in the empty mouth unsaid? Was it something once that moved, was it anything that breathes? What soul survives such a bad embodiment? What work on its first clean page, declares her name? We authors of the dark days provide no dedications.
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Simeon and Anna
With two young pigeons and a turtledove
you are lifted up (it won’t be the last time).
They can see right through you.