New Year’s Recall

Except for the New Year’s

obituaries

famous people

and their last assigned words

gone

and the radio preacher

preaching dire certainties

swearing

“you would not expect that from a god

who dormed at the Temple Mount

and willed his beard white

to persuade us of His wisdom”

He knows providence and how providence works three years

on-line his divinity study certificate

hanging

on the wall next to Christ

hanging

on the tree he calls it

takes him only three years to figure HIM out . . .

It is not a tree Reason

still reigns enough for me

to know

if that is true then

the world will end

we will have become too proud

and he may be right we will be punished

on the anniversary of some millenium

or decade’s end,

ourselves still sad

that the Hollywood stars are dying

and have nothing but film celluloid to speak

for them . . .

The year’s end brings the end of famous lives together

Lachrymose the only big word

to describe all this passing . . .

It seems the Spirit no longer strives

to reveal itself rather

lets go distracted by a tear  

Kitty Welles and Nora Ephron dead

and gone.

On the Job

they disappeared

on the job

in the job

faded into a habit of weak presence

pulled into what seemed like non-issuance

the gravity of swarm and sameness keeping

them low

they ate their scarred tuna

from a dark and tangled sea

and milled about the hive

as if clearing offal

the clarion buzz of institutional logic

waking each

to pleasant wordy logarithms of thought

“we are Family if but for the hive

we are One, glad to be alive”

they

looked forward  and beyond seldom

but when

the transparency grew viscous

and pollen wrote itself like Ouija

on the wall

they looked for a prophet with double a hundred eyes

to tell them what they knew

they heard many times over

through honey and wax, bee stench and queen pride

the precise sameness

the fatuous intensity

and were wowed with the invention

this apiary dreamt up

by king bees

and thought “just once to eat one’s fill of honey

and throw off the bee line never to come home. . . “

hive and heaven

in the small room with eight walls hotly contested they ate

their sandwich and with drooping proboscis watched

the pollen float

and it was then that some said “We can’t really fly, you know,”

and they fell in a puff of pollen like quibbling angels  

from and through what later they said was ether

which did not cushion the fall

One day as usual

they were not

they became not

they breathed elsewhere

ate their sandwich

tuna scars and all

and with honeyed whiskered sounds

debated in big words if there was a god

just for bees.  

She 1

The familiar one becomes silent

smiles and fusses

her plaid housedress

stuffed with crumpled receipts

memories bought and paid for

some still in their original packing. . .

She sits in a dream, on a chair

that is brown and worn where she rests her arms

near the window that juts out onto the driveway

in the light that scatters dust motes she thinks

she’s a child blowing

dandelion seeds to the wind.

The rude sun slings light at her

thick and yellow miscreant and  moteless

She breathes, nonetheless

a fog that drifts in rings

of cold rubble condemned to orbit

a past that recedes she disappears

sitting not far off

in small inaccessibility

her smoker’s rings dissolve upward

her dreams with statal authority 

take a seat the performance

gets underway.

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© Copyright, 2014, Steven Joyce.
All Rights Reserved.