{"id":5338,"date":"2020-07-20T08:00:48","date_gmt":"2020-07-20T08:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/floridareview.cah.ucf.edu\/?post_type=article&p=5338"},"modified":"2020-07-20T08:00:48","modified_gmt":"2020-07-20T08:00:48","slug":"two-poems-6","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/two-poems-6\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Poems"},"content":{"rendered":"

Breakfast with My Spiritual Advisor at Sunny Side Caf\u00e9<\/h3>\n

His first job out of school was working<\/p>\n

as a hospital chaplain at Mercy,<\/p>\n

sat bedside with the dying<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

for a living, and he tells me what<\/p>\n

it was like to wait for the joints<\/p>\n

in their fingers to go loose like he<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

was letting the fish steal the hook to swim<\/p>\n

back off into scripture with.<\/p>\n

Out down the road<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the early service releases and a ringing<\/p>\n

tower sends off the congregation<\/p>\n

with the old, irregular style bell<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

ringing that signifies to me an actual<\/p>\n

human is somewhere down there tugging<\/p>\n

one end of some rope that crashes<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

a lead tongue against the hollow insides<\/p>\n

of cast iron. You hear that, I say,<\/p>\n

pointing with a slice of bacon to the air,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

and he says they\u2019re an expression of joy<\/p>\n

meant to help us forget our sadness<\/p>\n

for a minute or so, and I say<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

it\u2019s there though, pointing at my heart<\/p>\n

with the bacon, the sadness, even<\/p>\n

when we let ourselves forget it,<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

same as it\u2019s always been,<\/p>\n

the heartache and the thousand<\/em><\/p>\n

natural shocks that flesh is heir to.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

He says he prefers Blake<\/p>\n

over Shakespeare any day of the week<\/p>\n

when it comes to either sadness or joy,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To see a world in a grain of sand<\/em>, he says<\/p>\n

and a heaven in a wild flower<\/em>.<\/p>\n

When the ringing quits<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I say I prefer Frank Stanford, which<\/p>\n

is a damn lie, but I don\u2019t tell him I actually<\/p>\n

prefer my wife\u2019s hair slinking down her back<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

though I do, or that I prefer sneaking out at night<\/p>\n

for a cigar on the porch in early fall,<\/p>\n

or that I\u2019ll always prefer to bury the light<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

and put on the darkness like a pair of wool socks<\/p>\n

with a hole in one of the big toes<\/p>\n

over Milton or Jesus or Sappho.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There are houses so broken<\/p>\n

they aren\u2019t worth fixing, and sometimes<\/p>\n

that\u2019s exactly how I feel. Waterlog turned<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

to dryrot turned so useless you couldn\u2019t<\/p>\n

sink a nail. Sometimes my wife whispers<\/p>\n

she loves me from the other room and all<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I hear are bells. Other times, there\u2019s only<\/p>\n

a lonely wind passing through the storm door<\/p>\n

whispering almost nothing at all.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Art Fair<\/h3>\n

I came to meander through open-air booths erected<\/p>\n

in the name of self-taught metallurgical fiends<\/p>\n

who curl lengths of iron into abstract lawn d\u00e9cor,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

in the name of grade school art teachers<\/p>\n

who scrawl feverish landscapes into the night,<\/p>\n

in the name of potters who breathe and bellow fire<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

into backyard kilns, in the name of woodworkers<\/p>\n

who turn burlwood into bowls for still-life prints.<\/p>\n

I came here because there exist people with second lives<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

that last longer than the first, and because we all<\/p>\n

eventually fall into the shapeless crowds who wander<\/p>\n

these grassy lanes like ghosts who\u2019ve fallen<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

into portraits tacked in museum galleries. If I fail<\/p>\n

to bargain down a smear of moon oil on canvas, just watch<\/p>\n

me move in on that bloodwood cutting board,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

or that hand-twined chandelier, because there\u2019s a price<\/p>\n

in my head that\u2019s incapable of change and all it takes<\/p>\n

is a bit of small talk and to look someone in the eyes.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I once convinced a man at a roadside fireworks tent<\/p>\n

to knock ten bucks off a 12-pack of Mississippi Gambler<\/p>\n

mortar shells so I could paint the night with more color<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

than you can imagine, and he just sat back into his body<\/p>\n

and his impossibly quiet lawn chair. Just sat back down<\/p>\n

into a life defined by a carnival tent of powder and fuse.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Listen, I came here to feel a rougher art rush through<\/p>\n

each one of my eye\u2019s billion vessels, because color<\/p>\n

and form, and because far from the Louvres<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

of the world artists still find ways to fashion<\/p>\n

grief into the arcades of other people\u2019s hearts.<\/p>\n

Because somewhere near these tents meat smoke rises<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

from pork fat spit into embers, and because somewhere<\/p>\n

there is a moveable stage upon which a bass player<\/p>\n

slowly unlatches his case, and because soon enough<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

the lights of this art fair will begin to dim, and each<\/p>\n

one of us will drift back to the silence of our homes<\/p>\n

where we will each unearth from slumber the stud-finder<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

level, hammer and a single nail in order to hang<\/p>\n

an image upon the dining room wall<\/p>\n

where before there was nothing, until now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

he tells me what \/ it was like to wait for the joints \/ in their fingers to go loose . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":5342,"template":"","categories":[9,49,119],"tags":[6,1546,1547,1548,512,1549,1550,1551,1552,1553,1554,1555,1556,1557,1558],"class_list":["post-5338","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-literary-features","category-poetry","tag-aquifer-the-florida-review-online","tag-art-fair","tag-bell-ringing","tag-breakfast-with-my-spiritual-advisor-at-sunny-side-cafe","tag-creativity","tag-death-and-dying","tag-frank-stanford","tag-jesus","tag-john-milton","tag-religion","tag-sappho","tag-spirituality","tag-travis-mossotti","tag-william-blake","tag-william-shakesepeare"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTwo Poems - The Florida Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/two-poems-6\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Two Poems - 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