From Therapon, I
A stranger walks into a bar and the bartender asks
the usual? it happens all the time but today the TV
is on fire and then an ad whose medicated sadness
walks into a pasture oblivious to the possible
side effects one of whom is death which feels more
like a central feature but today a crippled willow
pours a little river through the wound of the eye
whatever the lie it keep breaking out of a circle
as worlds do in poems violence in cartoons and you
dear sadness I want to ask are you wearing a mask
are you safe I need you the way an actor needs an act
of faith and then a curtain and sometimes the tears
continue long after never knowing whom we mourn
Imagine a line against the dry horizon call it
Pastura call it south of the Sangre de Christos
a watering hole for locomotives who bear
letters for a post that lo appears ex nihilo a chapel
a bar a makeshift cross among the nameless
crosses of a field say the word and I am there
says the word and then by railcar a little news
and no this is no pasture soaked in blood we are
not angels if you are not sure ask a neighbor
ask the choired zeros ever wider than the walls
or the ropes of smoke that disappear and ghost
the rise and fall of towns in waves ask those
who linger after whose tumblers runneth over
Eden is only some letters buried in a pasture,
Grass obedient to an inner law
Also commanding us, water inside a bone
No one can drink. The mind works its if-then
Logic, builds from nothing the architecture of is,
But the middle is excluded, the little hinge
Of the hyphen, that hidden ampersand, barren
For some, for others, the only form of prayer
God heeds. The dead speak in grammar of paradise—
No breath so no vowels, no pause between words, ask
Any question and the answer sounds the same, choir
Of twigs cracking as they burn, a song not of blame
Or knowledge, but something else, what runneth within & away.
Bruce Bond is the author of 35 books including, most recently, Patmos (Juniper Prize, UMass, 2021), Behemoth (New Criterion Prize, 2021), Liberation of Dissonance (Schaffner Award for Literature in Music, Schaffner, 2022), Choreomania (MadHat, 2023), and Invention of the Wilderness (LSU, 2023). Presently he teaches part-time as a Regents Emeritus Professor of English at the University of North Texas and performs jazz and classical guitar in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.
Dan Beachy-Quick is poet, essayist, and translator. His work has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim Foundations, and he teaches at Colorado State University, where he is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar.