You know what the Rapture is?
It's a big deal in the South, maybe
it's a big deal in the Southwest, too.
Rapture is when everybody goes up, you know, it happens.
If I just go straight up.
March Journal.
It's a different March than what we have around here.
I use the "we" because I used to live out West too.
March Journal.
After the Rapture comes and everyone
goes away quicker than cream in a cat's mouth, all of them gone
in an endless slipknot down the sky, and its pink tongue
into the black hole of somewhere else,
what will we do?
Left with the empty spaces of our lives intact,
the radio frequency still unchanged,
the same houses up for sale, same books unread,
all comfort gone and its comforting...
For us, the Earth is a turbulent rest;
a different bed altogether and kinder than that--
After the first death is the second.
A little fire in the afterglow, somewhere to warm your hands.
The clean, clear line, incised, unbleeding, sharp,
and declarative as a cut, the instant before the blood
wells out.
[COUGHING]
March blues.
The insides were blue, the color of power putty.
When Luke dissected the dogfish, the plastic blue in the whey,
sharkskin infenestrated: its severed tail fin
bobbed like a wing nut in another pan.
As he explained the dye job and what connected with what,
its pursed lips skewed and pointed
straight-lined at the ceiling.
The insides so blue, so blue.
March gets its second wind, starlings high shine
in the trees as dread puts his left foot down and then
the other.
Buds hold their breaths and sit tight,
the weeping cherries lower their languorous necks
and nibble the grass sprout ends that jump head first
from the ground.
Magnolia drums blue weight next door when the sun is right.
Rhythm comes from the roots of the world,
rehearsed and expandable.
After the ice storm, a shower of crystal down from the trees
shattering over the ground, like cut glass
twirling its rainbows.
Sunlight in flushed layers under the clouds,
twirling and disappearing into the clenched March grass.
Structure is binary, intent on a resolution,
its parts tight but the whole loose
and endlessly repetitious.
And here we stand, caught in the crucifixion noon
with its bled, attendant bells, and nothing
to answer back with.
Forsythia purrs in its burning shell,
jonquils, like Dante's angels, appear from their blue shoots.
How can we think to know of another's
desire for darkness, that low coo like a dove's,
insistent outside the heart's window?
How can we think to think this?
How can we sit here crossing out line
after line, such five finger exercises up and down, learning
our scales, and say that all quartets are eschatological
heuristically
when the willow swim like Medusas
through the trees, their skins beginning to blister
into 1,000 green welts?
How can we think to know these things, clouds like full suds
in the sky keeping away, keeping away?
Form is finite, an undestroyable hush over all things.