the magdalen with the smoking flame georges de la tour 1636
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quaalude.
the back of my brain buzzes.
i pan the streets for gold;
throat a heart's cliff edge,
stomach a fluttering vibrato.
a peripheral trick and they both lurch but
it’s just magical thinking.
it’s not you.
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the mission is too important.
we bomb
and we bomb
and we bomb
and we bomb,
our breaths no longer for sustenance, only fuel;
vindictive, smug in their dustlessness,
their clarity.
we bomb and we bomb and we think nothing of the bombed,
nothing of our own grandchildren
whose fates we've sealed into living in rubble.
an elder waves a hand,
hasn't seen dust in a generation.
his prodigal sons snicker at the suggestion;
soothed,
spoiled,
taught to bomb,
never to befriend or even to look over one’s shoulder.
our elders die,
peacefully,
never knowing.
because now
the bombs will not stop falling -
relentless, almost dull, they can't.
habitual,
instinctive,
our grandchildren will admit they find them a nuisance
but the murmur is too familiar;
distant thuds a comfort ranked alongside their lover's heartbeat.
all the while
the winds change
as they always do,
as they once did for us, remember?
the bombed
also had children
whose children sit now under the shade of military towers their fathers never lived to see.
dust rustles listlessly at their ankles,
they turn around, just to check,
and then
they bomb.
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genesis.
i think of the flood
and the God who found need for it a mere eight chapters after there was light.
his certainty we’d keep faith even knowing we’d once been drowned;
of the gravity of those sins (censored) demanding our extermination (explicit.)
i think of the flood and the men who recorded it then;
a mass mercy killing at the hand of the all-righteous.
his singular solution set in a foreground of choicelessness,
framed by curtains of irredeemability, of future promise.
i think of God establishing a covenant never to destroy all life again
by flood,
an immaterial concession,
his chest full, his fingers crossed,
his strategy ripe for the mimicking.
and i think of those record keeper's ancestors,
how they're documenting our time right now.
whose unimpeachable evils they're scrying can be excised in no other way
whose absolutely necessary evolutionary era have i found myself born into
reading the history books eons from here
they'll be satisfied -
the good guy definitely won out in the end, that's for sure,
but
they're all damn glad they weren't around to have to survive it.
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idolatry.
You're sure you're not in love with me
she says with her eyes, nonchalantly,
a woman accustomed to asking.
they glint green just around the rim
some verdant ancestor refusing to die.
she tilts her head, furrows her brow, repeats
"You're sure you won't come with me?"
words swollen with entendre, you’re convinced
her hair backlit and sparkling,
"virgin" she's joked, never once dyed.
she kisses your cheek in departure,
wants to get back to the way our parents generation did it.
daunting,
the cliff of her jaw
the curve of her shoulder
all not nearly near enough;
haunting,
too many of your days,
inexorable from your nights,
this ghost who hasn't even died.
rule breaker, you think,
no,
rewriter,
carving them as she goes in gold,
a lightning strike, a mountain in smoke,
consummate impossibility.
where were you before this
lost
or worse, complacent
what were you before this
a dissident
an infidel
now
a man with a living exodus -
perhaps no better off, no closer to salvation,
but at least renewed in belief.
a heretic
commanded testily back to the faith.
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typical.
the sun is out
my father digs in the garage for some passed-down or possibly over-borrowed yard tool
my mother preempts her cooking with asterisks and winces
my brother breezes in as my husband sneaks inside jokes into another conversation
we laugh at it all
the surety of the impossibly perfect gadget buried somewhere in those steel chest drawers
the richness of the excellent meal, the ridiculousness of her apologies
the way the weatherman gets off scot-free even when he's plumb wrong
today there'd been no bad drivers on our roads
no cells dividing imperfectly (to the best of our knowledge)
our old dog runs underfoot, scolded for nearly toppling visitors
the visitors still come
they're all still here
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portrait of miranda albert henry collings 1909
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American values.
justice stands slack-jawed and stymied.
temperance storms off.
hope and faith break into a screaming match,
drowning charity's sobs.
prudence folds her hands,
purses her lips,
knows her sisters,
their sacrifices - ritual, cyclical, sometimes strategic but often shoddy.
their brothers have grown unwieldly of late.
her eyes land on fortitude.
the room silences in the weight of decision.
they return to themselves, encircle her, this patron saint of last stands,
nothing left to do in the face of such deadly sin
but to simply go on.
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hindsight:
interj. a patchy grey bruise on a pristine white page; the audible splintering of ice in warm water; a red helium balloon tied to a toddlers wrist, stark against the serene sky
musée 