Once you get entranced by what birds can do in winter\u2014 ~<\/p>\n Kayla Mueller died this week ~<\/p>\n We live in what people on the coasts ~<\/p>\n Winter Sundays are for football. Our priest ~<\/p>\n Nobody who commits to the singular The Answer to Your Question is Yes, but Not as Some Unremitting Paradise Once you get entranced by what birds can do in winter\u2014 stark murmurations against a grey sky, seed pods scavenged in a landscape that looks blank and nearly dead\u2014you forget that the stone statues on the parish lawn have some meaning too, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":186,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[338,339],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nstark murmurations against a grey sky,
\nseed pods scavenged in a landscape that looks blank
\nand nearly dead\u2014you forget that the stone statues
\non the parish lawn have some meaning too,
\nbloodless as they are, weathered and cracked as they are.
\nAnselm of Canterbury shouldering snow,
\nhapless against the drifts, his head lopped off
\nby bored teenagers out driving around one weekend night,
\ntheir stomachs full of fried food and beer.
\nThe priest of the little parish can only laugh
\nas he shovels snow the next morning.
\nHe is still trying to believe that what\u2019s broken is
\nredeemed by opening itself to the wind\u2019s bitter speech.
\nTake the skin of a drunk, pale and thin
\nas a bible page, how it scurfs and fissures into sores;
\nthe starlings, credited with no miracle
\nbut that of the commonplace, floating in the northwest gusts
\nof an Alberta clipper; Anselm, who once prayed
\nfor illness so he might enter the cloistered life,
\nsubject to the laughter of wind and birds alike.
\nIt is Saturday. Our priest has time to pace
\nwith his plastic shovel, halfheartedly shifting snow
\nand mulling a homily on grace and time and mercy
\nthat he has delivered far too many times.
\nLook at the birds of the air; they neither sow
\nnor reap nor gather into barns. And which of you
\nby being anxious can add a single hour to his life?<\/em>
\nNot the foraging birds whose only faith is instinct,
\nnot these congregants who only pray for comfort.
\nHe thinks of spring and his neighbors\u2019
\nhorse shoes clanging against the stakes.
\nHe\u2019s been reading about the world\u2019s
\noldest backgammon set found in the Burnt City
\nin Southern Iran. The archeologist who discovered it
\nwondered that a civilization concerned
\nprimarily with daily existence could find time
\nto fashion such an artful diversion:
\ndice cut from goat talus, game pieces carved
\nfrom agate and turquoise, an engraved serpent
\ncoiled twenty times around itself in the middle
\n of the board.<\/p>\n
\nin \u201ca bombing that we don\u2019t know
\nthe provenance of,\u201d or so the State Department
\nclaims, though it quickly becomes clear
\nthat it was one of our own raids. Her captor,
\nBaghdadi, tore out her fingernails
\nbefore making her his wife, her nail beds
\npustuled like pomegranate berries, seeping
\nthrough the bandages as he fed her words
\nfor homebound letters: \u201cI am healthy,
\nremaining strong, and being treated kindly.
\nDo not worry for me.\u201d The dice decide
\nwhat God in his sanguine thirst defers:
\nWe will not barter with the underworld
\nfor this or any girl<\/em>. The fallow ground,
\naccordioned by last year\u2019s furrows, cratered
\nin and swallowed her. Our priest dreams
\nof hyacinth and crocus, but she will not
\nreturn with spring. Beaten to the floor
\nof a weapons warehouse in Syria,
\nher front and canine teeth clubbed out
\ndays before we flattened the place,
\nwe who othered the abduction long ago
\nand called it winter.<\/p>\n
\ncall \u201cflyover country,\u201d where outmoded
\nindustrial workers drink cheap beer
\nand play backyard games to kill
\nthe time. It\u2019s a Sunday in April.
\nI spend the morning on the back porch,
\nreading and re-reading a paragraph in Edward Said\u2019s
\nOrientalism<\/em> while Jerry, my retired truck driver
\nneighbor, periodically shouts over the fence
\nabout the impossibility of properly tensioning
\na new Honda\u2019s serpentine belt,
\n\u201cBecause them Japs got everything jammed in there
\nbetween the quarter panel and engine block
\nso you can\u2019t get to it with the wrench.\u201d
\nI hear the car in question squealing in his driveway
\nlike a shoat. A few men are throwing horse shoes
\nat the next door neighbor\u2019s house.
\nSomeone is shouting for me to look
\nat his kissing sisters on that pole.
\nWe say, \u201cSalt of the earth,\u201d as if our people are good.
\nWe say, \u201cbackbone of the country,\u201d
\nas though we haven\u2019t destroyed the body.
\nI call my dog over and scratch the scruff around his collar.
\nI wonder if dogs really know their names,
\nor if the recognition is like reading an enigmatic
\nline whose cadence sounds familiar,
\nwhose meaning never quite descends.
\nJerry\u2019s grandson feeds my dog biscuits
\nthrough the chain-link fence.
\nJerry passes me a bottle of Budweiser
\nand says, \u201cIf it aint Bud it aint beer,
\nand if it aint country, it aint music.\u201d
\nI address myself like a puzzled friend:
\nWith all of the atrocities taking place,
\nwhy are you concerned with the plight
\nof a washed-up union trucker on a fixed income?
\nThere are far greater indignities
\nthan fixing your neighbors\u2019 foreign
\ncars in exchange for beer.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nknows this. He scraps the stuff about grace
\nand mercy and begins to really
\npreach: Subtract desired yardage
\nfrom the time you have been given; hang
\nthat number like a guidepost. Stretch
\nthe chains of yourself before
\nthis sphere of flesh. Time runs off
\nwhen we keep the ball on the ground.
\nAir it out. This only seems like a game.<\/em>
\nI hear him through the windows of the church
\nas I walk the dog to the creek.<\/p>\n
\ncompulsion of an act rests easy,
\nwhich is why despite all
\nevidence we suspect the dead
\nhave returned as birds to offer omens.
\nCowbirds mob the red-tailed hawk
\nthat has been hunting in our neighborhood
\n all week.
\nA rat swims like a mallard until it eyes me
\nin the riparian muck then dives below
\nthe surface before scurrying up the high bank.
\nSomebody has called off the spring. This is not spring
\nbut undivided time in the guise of brown-green water.
\nSouth Dearborn Heights is swollen like a spleen
\nor blessing, and I am not me when I come here
\neach afternoon, the last observer of a forgotten ritual,
\na hierophant rattling old bones at Lupercal,
\ndigging up burdock for the tincture,
\ntossing the burs into the water where
\nthey float for a moment before
\nthe dumb fish rise to swallow them.
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"