What are you doing here, I say.
I am giving you a book, says the apparition,
Or rather the contents of a book.
I am instructed to peel a layer of paper from your skin
Like a birch tree,
Birds singing in their Latin
Hanging on your branches.
But first we must do some breathing exercises,
Says the apparition.
Like Satanism, in its practiced expressions,
Always the many children of your idle imaginations,
Your fears, churches and churches, which you spelled out
With vomit in secret Sunday schools,
The naughty alien children picking up your tracts
And the fear you bear begetting on them,
The book the apparition dictates is disappointing.
I have things to be doing, I say.
Don't shoot the messenger,
Says the apparition.
You don't say anything.
Apparently and according to pseudoscience,
We are standing on a point where ley lines crisscross,
And I feel there are Visigoths pressing in from the north,
From all the borders, Like a heavy headache-
I see the concentric circles of Hildegard's visions
Vibrating, in and out,
Around the track lighting in a kitchen as the cigarette smoke of a negligent, sitting parent
Curls up there, like a suspension
making the air self-conscious, whereas it usually
Doesn't notice its invisibility.
So we are in a kitchen, I say.
But the apparition has diffused.
I guess it is your kitchen.
You say nothing.
I leave the book on the table and search the pantries.
This experience has left my stomach empty, and contracted.
I find only cans dented outward with botulisms,
And the apparition collects itself,
Making remarks about spiritual food that I only catch the end of.
It occurs to me to ask if this new religion we are proposing
Ought to be an ism. I am still hungry.
The disapparition fades into the air again;
He must be getting poor reception.
At my church
The priest stands
With bread in his hands,
Velvet-headed I danger myself,
Cautious but crumbloving bird,
To break the good news.
He smiles, he always called me Churchmouse
As a child.
I never get to show him the book,
To ask if it pleases or displeases,
Because on the wafer he gives me is written
EAT ME
And I soon grow large and fill the church,
My arms out the windows, my legs out the doors
(Sorry about the stained glass)
And my head becomes the belfry,
Ringing and ringing.
After some more pseudoscience
I am cut down to size, but I retain on my skin
Those fleur-de-lis shaped snow catchers that lined the edge of the church roof.
With lips both moving and still,
Like the Earth,
The apparition gives me the final chapter to his book.
It is still disappointing, it is run of the mill everlasting life stuff.
Pearl Curran got to write about fun stuff, I said.
Finally, he agrees to let me put it in verse and add some drama,
But he insists on the content.
Abel Thanks Cain
Abel thanks Cain for making a sacrifice of him,
I'm better than a lamb all right, he says, dying.
Cain gives him a few more blows, pounding him into the earth with a stick,
Working him into the soil like a good farmer.
God comes down and gives him a watering can full of blood,
And fair warning.
Soon a tree grows there, but instead of figs
Nails fall out of the flowers three at a time.
A dove lands on it holding an olive branch,
And God says, from somewhere,
You might want to chop this thing down
And make a boat out of it.
But before Cain can lift the ax
He is swallowed by a whale.
Meanwhile the tree is underwater, growing.
Cain builds a city inside the whale, the water dries up
And the tree wanders the desert,
Tempted forty times to put down its roots.
Poet Laureate
she didn't know but
she was raised
like a plant
to stay in one place
her literary output was spare
she revised her one piece
every week, each draft slightly different
eggs
milk
bread
pie crust
bleach
eggs
skim milk
toilet paper
lightbulbs
bread
eggs
sk m
br-2
tomato paste
peanut butter
egs
sk m
t.p.
froz beef-2 ½ lb
br
she didn't know but
these averaged out
into an autobiography
written by someone else
we found her dead in the kitchen
bay leaves from the toppled spice cabinet in her hair
that makes her our poet laureate