Breakfast with My Spiritual Advisor at Sunny Side Café
His first job out of school was working
as a hospital chaplain at Mercy,
sat bedside with the dying
for a living, and he tells me what
it was like to wait for the joints
in their fingers to go loose like he
was letting the fish steal the hook to swim
back off into scripture with.
Out down the road
the early service releases and a ringing
tower sends off the congregation
with the old, irregular style bell
ringing that signifies to me an actual
human is somewhere down there tugging
one end of some rope that crashes
a lead tongue against the hollow insides
of cast iron. You hear that, I say,
pointing with a slice of bacon to the air,
and he says they’re an expression of joy
meant to help us forget our sadness
for a minute or so, and I say
it’s there though, pointing at my heart
with the bacon, the sadness, even
when we let ourselves forget it,
same as it’s always been,
the heartache and the thousand
natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
He says he prefers Blake
over Shakespeare any day of the week
when it comes to either sadness or joy,
To see a world in a grain of sand, he says
and a heaven in a wild flower.
When the ringing quits
I say I prefer Frank Stanford, which
is a damn lie, but I don’t tell him I actually
prefer my wife’s hair slinking down her back
though I do, or that I prefer sneaking out at night
for a cigar on the porch in early fall,
or that I’ll always prefer to bury the light
and put on the darkness like a pair of wool socks
with a hole in one of the big toes
over Milton or Jesus or Sappho.
There are houses so broken
they aren’t worth fixing, and sometimes
that’s exactly how I feel. Waterlog turned
to dryrot turned so useless you couldn’t
sink a nail. Sometimes my wife whispers
she loves me from the other room and all
I hear are bells. Other times, there’s only
a lonely wind passing through the storm door
whispering almost nothing at all.
Art Fair
I came to meander through open-air booths erected
in the name of self-taught metallurgical fiends
who curl lengths of iron into abstract lawn décor,
in the name of grade school art teachers
who scrawl feverish landscapes into the night,
in the name of potters who breathe and bellow fire
into backyard kilns, in the name of woodworkers
who turn burlwood into bowls for still-life prints.
I came here because there exist people with second lives
that last longer than the first, and because we all
eventually fall into the shapeless crowds who wander
these grassy lanes like ghosts who’ve fallen
into portraits tacked in museum galleries. If I fail
to bargain down a smear of moon oil on canvas, just watch
me move in on that bloodwood cutting board,
or that hand-twined chandelier, because there’s a price
in my head that’s incapable of change and all it takes
is a bit of small talk and to look someone in the eyes.
I once convinced a man at a roadside fireworks tent
to knock ten bucks off a 12-pack of Mississippi Gambler
mortar shells so I could paint the night with more color
than you can imagine, and he just sat back into his body
and his impossibly quiet lawn chair. Just sat back down
into a life defined by a carnival tent of powder and fuse.
Listen, I came here to feel a rougher art rush through
each one of my eye’s billion vessels, because color
and form, and because far from the Louvres
of the world artists still find ways to fashion
grief into the arcades of other people’s hearts.
Because somewhere near these tents meat smoke rises
from pork fat spit into embers, and because somewhere
there is a moveable stage upon which a bass player
slowly unlatches his case, and because soon enough
the lights of this art fair will begin to dim, and each
one of us will drift back to the silence of our homes
where we will each unearth from slumber the stud-finder
level, hammer and a single nail in order to hang
an image upon the dining room wall
where before there was nothing, until now.