Holy Blood

Here is Purgatory too: vines and flowers
Extend from a woman's neck, but her legs wander
Away beneath a shower of black holy blood.
A chemo spirit struts, though she's lost her powers
To console or restore the faith others squander,
Lost all but her rage to escape the coming flood.
Little live hands reach through the clouds yearning to touch
What they can't comprehend, like the Klein-bottle-brained
Devil with the tied shoestring eyes, who knows too much.
He is no god, this clown, though he has often reigned.

Our Winter

Mid-January and winter has arrived at last.

The branches droop beneath the snow of two

storms.  No bird has sung for us in weeks.

I have read of winters so cold, so long,

the birds fell like leaves from the trees;

always war is raging nearby or the smoke

of the crematorium has smeared the snow like

a gray, vague and indecipherable rubbing.

No bird in my backyard falls from a branch

that doesn’t catch the air beneath its wings

and swoop off into the wind with a kind of

triumph.  I have never been shot at either.

And yet, not forty miles from here a man

was dismembered and his body parts used

in a ritual with no better purpose than

the resurrection of some long dead devil.

In the next county, a girl of sixteen was

hog-tied and set on fire by two brothers

who confessed she had teased them with her

body.  One brother accused the other

of dancing to the rhythm of her screams.

And so, each day, I watch the birds.  This

morning, a cardinal sat hunched on a limb—

as if I’d mistake him for a bloody fist.