THE ARGUEMENT

On the way to the village store I drive through a down-draft from the neighbor’s chimney. Woodsmoke tumbles from the eaves backlit by sun, reminding me of the fire and sulfur of Grandmother’s vengeful God, the one who disapproves of jeans and shorts for girls, dancing, strong waters, and adultery.

A moment later the smoke enters the car, although the windows are tight, insinuating that I might, like Judas, and the foolish virgins, and the rich young man, have been made for unquenchable fire. God will need something to burn if the fire is to be unquenchable.

“All things work together for the good for those who love God,” she said to comfort me at Uncle Hazen’s funeral, where Father held me up to see the maroon gladiolus that trembled as we approached the bier, the elaborate shirred satin, brass fittings, anything,

oh, anything but Uncle’s squelched and made-up face. “No! NO! How is it good to be dead?” I cried afterward, wild-eyed and flushed. “God’s ways are not our ways,” she said then out of pity and the wish to forestall the argument.

Jane Kenyon, “The Argument” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by the Estate of Jane Kenyon. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

THE SECOND COMING by william burt yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

SPEECH THERAPY

The ugly duckling remained ugly its whole life but found others as ugly as itself, I guess that’s the message. Smoke rises from the heads in the backyard. Do you think if I hang around here long enough someone will proffer a muffin, one skulking shadow to another? Soon, my shoes will be part of the populous dirt. Have I learned all the wrong lessons, the ones you shouldn’t know until the last dew-clogged lawn is mowed and the sun goes down on the ruined battlements? Why was I given a toy train if not to stage stupendous wrecks? Sure, I can walk by the sea holding a hand with as much melancholy as the next fellow, substituting the cries of slammed waves for the droll adumbrations of distraught skeletons, the day taking on the sheen of a stone removed from the mouth and skipped between the breakers jubilant and sunk.

"THE ACTS OF THE YOUTH. a must read poem.

And with great fear I inhabit the middle of the night What wrecks of the mind await me, what drugs to dull the senses, what little I have left, what more can be taken away? The fear of travelling, of the future without hope or buoy. I must get away from this place and see that there is no fear without me: that it is within unless it be some sudden act or calamity to land me in the hospital, a total wreck, without memory again; or worse still, behind bars. If I could just get out of the country. Some place where one can eat the lotus in peace. For in this country it is terror, poverty awaits; or am I a marked man, my life to be a lesson or experience to those young who would trod the same path, without God unless he be one of justice, to wreak vengeance on the acts committed while young under un-due influence or circumstance. Oh I have always seen my life as drama, patterned after those who met with disaster or doom. Is my mind being taken away me. I have been over the abyss before. What is that ringing in my ears that tells me all is nigh, is naught but the roaring of the winter wind. Woe to those homeless who are out on this night. Woe to those crimes committed from which we can walk away unharmed. So I turn on the light And smoke rings rise in the air. Do not think of the future; there is none. But the formula all great art is made of. Pain and suffering. Give me the strength to bear it, to enter those places where the great animals are caged. And we can live at peace by their side. A bride to the burden that no god imposes but knows we have the means to sustain its force unto the end of our days. For that is what we are made for; for that we are created. Until the dark hours are done. And we rise again in the dawn. Infinite particles of the divine sun, now worshipped in the pitches of the night.
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