SubTerrain » poetry

New Deadly Sins

A child of God from Tennessee told me I’m aging well.
It all comes back to big creature voice,
to the faith-shadow flinch beneath still water and quick water.
It’s what we know from the bitter,
like the scrawl at the Devon wood mill’s loading dock:
Patti I love! You. Please come home. Bob.
Love letter on the loading dock and God in the aging.
It’s why there are new sins now,
because too many are making do without god and these small miracles
in magic marker come home, catch the bird, cure the stove.

Last week the headlines claimed “Ideology Trumped Science at Texas Agency.”
This is why I wait late night for your long distance calls,
lean close to the receiver to hear the underwire slung with silence
when we speak as one or lose the words that keep the thought soft.
It’s why Prometheus may have been a pinko in the gap-spilled firelight,
called all sorts of things for cupping the flame, offering it.

Look, we’re all aging well. Come home.
Because there’s news in a strange language,
the seriousness clasped in the diphthong’s severed link.
It’s always another civil war, another IMF backroom deal.

The signal is freak light over these untranslatable hills
where the church bells la-la-la every half hour
and the wi-fi times out before it begins.
But news anchors in low-cut blouses believe
what I can’t understand.
Maybe it comes from pixels, from bells,
the voices perched on so much empty,
and these sins so tight around the neck.

Remember that time I fell on black ice?
The pain sparked God.
Not cupped but spilled.