St. George and the Dragon Come to America

February 2007

I blame the Hold Steady for the wacky religious references, and also probably for the rhythm of it. I blame myself for the highly experimental attempt to convey that rhythm through formatting.

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We came to America looking for mountains of gold and religious freedom
So that one day a man could sit down in his church and pray
without believing in God
And kneel to the Virgin Mary
and ask her to help him get laid
While St. George and the Dragon are both out to help him get paid.

So that one day a barefoot boy could climb onto an altar in Minneapolis
And proclaim in a wavering voice the forgiveness of sins,
and the election of sinners,
Inspire the resurrection of riots,
condemnation of organized thievery,
And the Virgin Mary just wants to cure his fever.

St. George killed the Dragon with edges and corners,
Because some kinds of dragon are thin, and others
Get shot through the tip of a pin. He never
Found Jesus but he felt like he was getting warmer.

We came to America looking for brotherly love and for open spaces
So that one day a man of God could break down shaking and screaming
in a county jail
After breaking the faith of a dozen
fine Midwestern towns
And St. George and the Dragon have both tried to bring him around.

So that one day a stupid old man could hear the clarion call of the one true faith
As professed by a barefoot boy with ecstatic visions
and confused relations,
The one who can’t tell his doctors,
one of them looks like the Savior.
And the Virgin Mary just hopes he’s the one who can save him.

Return

November 2006

Agnostic that I am, I find religious references fascinating. One of a few poems I wrote for my poetry workshop that I didn’t end up using.

Return once to the gypsy highway,
The purple moor, return again

To the blue horizon, the faceless moon
Again, again to the blazing sword

Which turns every way, Jerusalem
In rags, Jerusalem, the house of God

A house of swords, a frame of glass
A gas, expansive, a taut string

God’s own relentless sky embraces
The earth indeterminate erupts

The sun, a rose in mourning
The stars, a house of glass

Return again to the darkly glittering
Morning, electric, rebuilding

The cavern sky, the gypsy moonlight
The faceless moon, the crashing dove

That holds a house of sand upon
Its wings of gypsum rose and gypsy

Moth that floats upon the careless wind
God’s own relentless sky embraces

The house of swords, the frame of glass
Immaculate in waiting fragments, chance

Return, shattering, to the faceless sky,
The gypsy moon, the purple moor
The empty room, the open door

Welcome to the Monkey House

November 2006

Whee! Self-examination – and physics!… there are explanations behind most of the weirder epithets. Oh, and credit where credit is due: Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Vonnegut’s short stories, which I highly recommend. “Who Am I This Time?” is a story in that collection.

God bless the reckless instinct that asks “Who am I this time?”
The reckless rose, in restless prose, by any other name–
Oh, any other name! Let fly the mercy of the indistinct parade, the
Eccentric in elegant armor, the haberdasher by night, or the

Dear occupant, this space must be vacated. Please disperse, sincerely,
Who is it this time? Chance stranger to myself some days, lost
In a suitcase, a writer of love songs, a gypsy moth, one who
Worships the dawn, but sleeps through it.

A builder of chance cathedrals, made a sweeper of floors
In industrial corrugated steel-on-concrete. He who stares intently at the
Radio, the washed-out green, the nervous spatter of five AM
Highway drowning in static and rain-swept grays.

And yet explodes the unexpected moment, Who am I this time?
He who wakes to buzzing lip and jangling nerves. Energy,
Electric, inexhaustibly awake – to become, toward becoming, an echo of the
Senseless sky, an agent of an empty room, an incoherent –
Schroedinger’s Self, a barely shrouded storm.

Sumatra

November 2006

So many teensy revisions had to be made to this one. The muse, she is a stubborn wench sometimes.

Two hands that held the sky caught fire,
The moon by string and the sun by wire.
And no one else was watching

But me a lost astronomer,
A hollow tube, the broken earth
And you a crashing dove.

May we all fall in love like the avalanche.
May we all carve our sorrows in the sea.
May we all forget.

Two stars that struck the sea came down,
The molten shards of moonlight drowned,
Like a shattered lily in an open wound,
In exploding sheet-glass water.

You were a blade of snow.
You were a harp of white fire.
You were gone.

Falling Star Questions

Early Fall 2006

Mostly just funny.

If the stars all fell down from the sky
Would they glisten and shine like the dew?
Would we cut up our feet on their diamond edges?
Would they shrivel and wrinkle and turn blue?

But the answer is worse than the asking,
So don’t tell me just shut your eyes
And pretend that the sky is unceasingly black
But the fields are all littered with bright fireflies.

And the stars could all fall down tomorrow.
We’d never remember their names.
If Sirius switched with Polaris,
They’d probably seem just the same.

If the stars all decided to land here,
Would they still disappear in the day?
And then flare at our feet and our fingers
When the light of the sun fades away?

And the answer is worse than the asking,
So don’t tell me just shut your eyes
And swear that the road is a river of silver
While darkness embraces the depths of the sky.

If the stars all fell down from the sky
Would we shovel them out of our walks
Till we made little suns out of piles on our lawns
And got stardust all over our socks?