All right.
Two or three more poems from this book.
And then I'll read a few new poems.
It's called God The Broken Lock.
And actually this poem evolved out of an exercise
that a friend of mine had given me.
The poet Rick Jackson.
And the idea was that we were going to write each other--
we were going to write self-portraits,
but as each other.
So here's his act.
There is a poem in one of his books,
which is called Self-Portrait of a Rivard by Richard Jackson.
This one is simply called God The Broken Lock,
and it is Rick Jackson's self-portrait maybe.
I've died enough by now.
I trust just what's imperfect or ruined.
I mean, God.
God who is in the stop sign asking to be shot gunned.
The ocean that evaporates.
Even as we float, God the bent nail and broken lock,
and God the hangnail, the hangnail.
And a million others might be like me,
our hopes a kind of illegal entry,
a belief in smashed windows.
Every breakage like breaking and entering into a concert hall.
The place my friend and I crawled into an air shaft
and later fell asleep.
After breakage, there is always sleep.
We woke to gospel hymns from the dressing room below.
Songs commending embrace to the fists
and return to the Prodigal.
And hasn't my luck always been a shadow stepping out stretching?
I mean, I trust what breaks.
A broken bone elicits condolence.
And the phone call sounds French if the transmission fritzes.
And our brains are blessed.
Desirable brains are composed of infinitesimal magnets.
Millions of them are billionth of a milligram in weight.
So they make us knock our heads against hard walls.
When we pushed through the air vent,
the men singing seemed only a little surprised,
slightly freaked.
Three of them in black tuxes.
And the fourth in red satin.
Crimson lit up like a furnace trimmed with Paisley swirls.
The furnace of a planet or of a fantastic ocean
liner crisscrossing a planet.
We've not discovered yet a fire you
might love to be thrown into.
That night, they would perform the songs half the country kept
on its lips for half the day.
Songs mostly praising, or lamenting, or accusing some
loved one of some beautiful horrendous betrayal
or affection.
But dressing between primping and joking about their thinning
afros.
They sang of Jesus.
Jesus who said split a stick and you shall find me inside.
It was the winter.
We put on asbestos gloves.
And flame proof, stuck our hands in the fireplace,
adjusting logs.
Jesus, we told them, left no proof
of having sung a single note.
And that, said the lead singer, is why we all are sinners.
What he meant was we are all like the Saints on my neighbor's
lawns, whose plaster shoulders and noses, chipped cloaks
and tiaras, have to be bundled in plastic sheets each winter,
blanketed from the wind and the cold.
That was what he meant.
Though I couldn't know it then.
It's a very familiar image actually from my childhood.
And from some of the towns that I've lived in and around Boston.
The people have these plaster, statues of Saints, or of Mary.
And to bundle them up in plastic for the winter.
It's sweet actually.