Thursday, June 29, 2017

Faith’s Food

The streets can send off sparks
from their limited compartments:
too much love —
one doesn’t know what to do with
the songbirds in the sculpture
of airplane parts
or the fountains that won’t stop gushing
or the blue dame with the cigarette
standing raptly in a book,
for these things step out of the boots
of immutable appearance
as something purer,
and grow with the wind
to guide one, riding it to a larger
sun, a sky less defined,
until it’s powerful enough
one can withstand at last
the notice
of the tortures of the mind,
how its invisible bile spills
like steam out of stacks
to waiting air —
the prison is everywhere,
it is what cannot give,
it is there to take on
all the gradations of fear
like a vampiric connoisseur
because fear is, after all,
what we create out of nothing,
not like this,
what is already there,
what offers me, as I stare
at the gleam in the palm tree,
what is still unknown: being,
how the cardboard cutouts of our lives
won’t be redeemed.