Jolene’s Reviews > Contradictions in the Design > Status Update

From "Meditation of a Foot Soldier Nearing Medusa's Sculpture Garden"

If I am never
to move again, let me never
take for granted
how I've been granted
this permanence, this patience
to stand forever -- a stone
in this small corner of history --
among this statuary, able
to outlast birds, winged
horses, and their riders.

Who wouldn't scan the landscape for an exit route,
as he, without sleep, kept pointing and naming,
pointing and naming, each time hoping
that this was the last one?
But there is no end, he discovered.
Not even when he named the trails of ants
that latticed themselves over and under
the iron fence posts, or the worm
in the fruit, or the thing that crawled toward him,
on its belly, anonymous and kind.

From "Elegy in which I'm Unable to Travel Faster than the Speed of Sound"

If someone
would have said, Please, or Help,
those words would have made it to the other side
of the room, or through the door, before
the feeling -- inside your clenched fist --
of your fingernails
drawing blood from your palm
registered in your brain. But I don't remember
anyone saying anything like that.
I don't remember anyone speaking.

Sometimes I go outside, and the dark is so prodigious--
the way it remedies everything by covering everything.

I like thinking of how my friend stares
down this same darkness
as if it will offer the index to some temporal secret.

What we're looking for are miracles.

Out there--
there could be nothing.

Or there could be antlers and hooves.
Lumbering mysteries.
They plod across the quiet fields.

From "Nothing Gets Through to You, Jackass"

But they've got nothing on this jackass.
They had to try to be that stupid.
Me? I am working my hardest, every single day,
to act like a normal person.

But I slam a door when I mean
to say I love you.
I back my car into another
when I'm trying to move forward.

From "The Gallery of Small Innovations" (52)

If he listens hard enough,
he thinks he hears it: a sound so far off,
it's impossible to distinguish: the
murmur of friends gathered at the end
of a hallway, the splash of a single frog
into a pond surrounded by night,
or a quiver of bees so thick
around a tree that the tree can't be seen.

I remember my dad - decades ago - wrestling
a river bank with a fishing pole, how he struggled
with a shadow that thrashed beneath the surface
and he could never wrench it closer. The hooked
mouth chose to remain submerged and violent
below the reeds and river moss. Whatever
question I can't ask now is like that,
but I suspect it wants to know how the world
is different today, even though it's just one person smaller

From "The Raising of Lazarus"

In fact, if Caravaggio hadn't titled this The Raising
of Lazarus, I'd have no reason to think I was witness
to the impossible. Yet here I am, like those painted
into the crowd, watching the body for a flicker of life.
The flare of a lung. A tremble in the lips.
Here's the power of saying something, of suggestion

From "Deliver Us"

On the farm, night comes for the cattle,
like a postman over the ridge. He's dressed in blue
with a satchel slung from his shoulder.

Then night approaches the pigs.
He is a nurse in the infirmary
with a needle of mercy.

Then night comes for the lamb.
His eyes shine like the shears.
Look how dark it gets out here.
There is no lamb.

One letter tumbles
after another and if you get them right,
you can say: Astonishment. Put it together
a little differently and you have the Insanest Moth.
Even that moth contains its own cosmos of chance
and possibility. Consider the black witch moth.
There are parts of Mexico where it's believed to be
the harbinger of death. But it lands
on your door in Texas or the Bahamas,
you might win the lottery