Miniature Church
 

                   The Thorne Miniatures. Chicago, 1998

 

 

 

To enter, crouch

on your own eyebeam.

To genuflect, shrink.

 

Even this small

your Father in Heaven

expects it.

 

He’s hidden now

like a secret camera

in his risen dead

 

Son’s pint-sized

heart, in the grain

of the minuscule

 

crucifix, the star

thistle-sized thorns.

Marvelous!

 

how the minute

stigmata camouflages

the immense

 

suffering, 

like moth’s eyespots.

(Even the misguided

 

fly squeezed

in between stained

glass slats

 

must think

with the mind

of a midge or gnat.)

 

One faux crumb 

of shellacked 

grace waits

 

to come alive

on a Hummel

tongue. How gothic

 

a replica worship is.

When the universe

boomerangs back

 

from the existential,

this wee church

will be ready.

 

There’s even a baby

spoon of plastic holy

water in the vestibule

 

to pretend a blessing.

 

(from Feather’s Hand, Swan Scythe Press, 2000)

 

 

 

 

Riding AMTRAK in the Rain
                  Capitol Corridor, March 2011

 

mustard flowers Quonset hut trucks

carcasses of trucks machinery the river up

within a few feet of the tracks treetops limbs

weeds my face in the glass a book of poems

in the glass a man across the aisle his beret

in the glass sky behind him tapping tap-tap

his iPad keys his tipped cap among blurred

buildings shacks mattress mattress mattress mattress

tents slack collapsed tucked up beside the wet

the mud oxalis lamps tarps garbage disarray

OOOOOOO tires filled with weeds and rain-

water beauty beauty beauty trash orchards not-

quite in bloom heron hawk three crosses t t t

in a ditch among tules what (who) died there?

egret radiance bold in the bright slant of brief

sun white crookneck white hunchback fisher

king and woe to the minnows beneath his beak