Don't confuse what I say with honesty

I know that I'm not going on a trip until Friday, but it feels like I have no time left to pack and prepare road-snacks. Maybe it's because tomorrow will be a busy day with half of it spent out in the world.

Bah.

Have a poem. Have two poems!


Matins

Unreachable father, when we were first
exiled from heaven, you made
a replica, a place in one sense
different from heaven, being
designed to teach a lesson: otherwise
the same—beauty on either side, beauty
without alternative—Except
we didn’t know what was the lesson. Left alone,
we exhausted each other. Years
of darkness followed; we took turns
working the garden, the first tears
filling our eyes as earth
misted with petals, some
dark red, some flesh colored—
We never thought of you
whom we were learning to worship.
We merely knew it wasn’t human nature to love
only what returns love.

~ Louise Gluck


Beyond the 45th Parallel

I want alchemy from this ocean,
not these metaphors of endlessness.
I have driven two hundred miles in a rented car
for alchemy. Past the Burnt Woods
and the Chitwood Bridge. Over
the 45th Parallel marked by a small sign.
They are all small signs, he'd say--
but he'd mean something literal
about the footlong oblong, the green
behind white lettering. While I
imagine grass limp in the equatorial sun,
snow adrift at the pole--equidistance
compressed to a metal slate.

Like alchemy endlessness is a fiction.
We are always halfway to somewhere.
I want more than transmutation:
I want the god I pray to to be real.

-Geri Doran, from Resin