Ira Sadoff

In The Current Climate

All the ambience of Texas brought me to my knees.
I wanted to praise their wide-brim hats and long cascading lines
to churches, but not the sudden dust storms and downpours

that dim the city of Houston to the charred shade of gray
of concrete yards where prisoners at Guantanamo
still stroll an hour a day to dreamy tunes by Iron Butterfly.

You cannot make up Texas, you who only know
the President and the President’s cabinet, the President’s Yes men
and Yes women, the swagger, the high-mindedness.

There’s nothing candid there, nothing of nature’s shine
reflected on the river (where we don’t belong,
except to muddy the surface), where black-crowned night-herons

settle on one foot in the Rio Grande, their minds occupied
by nothing but fish, one particular silver catfish –
they couldn’t care less about the crappie, the bullhead, a school of pickerel_

when I’m inside the head of a heron I think we’re
so much alike, so much more and less alone. Oh my seismograph,
you are such a personal feeling. A minor figure,

of little import raised to the Nth power. Can I just stand here
on one foot all day, pretending you can’t see me?
Am I just I’m a little shiver dipping my beak into the water?

Brief Afternoons

In the brief afternoons of February,
when the whole God question comes up
like a knock on the door from Jehovah's witnesses_
no, not like them, but really them
and their stack of newspapers and questions, swirling
in the snow_I'm cautious, impatient, defenseless.
I guard the door like St. Peter or Cerberus,
The Word before it's written. We discuss the proof
of the snowflake, God's design and the sin of the self.
We require uplifting because of the chill
and the solitude, because we project onto the pines
endings and beginnings, the whiteness of snow
in the darkening quill of afternoon,
where January can no longer be corrected; December's
a parent's perpetual death and July a child's fairy tale.
But now they're at my door with their gloomy accusations,
and because of the lateness of the hour,
because I have no defense, no justification
outside myself, I invite them in for tea_
together, white man and black man, the lapsed
and the saved, we watch the wind push the snow,
we listen to the woodstove chatter and whisper and hiss.

The Soul

for John Mizner

The shaft of narrative peers down.
The soul’s a petrified fleck of partridge this October.
Mud-spattered, it thinks it’s brush, it thinks
it’s one with the brush when God aims

just below its feathers. It’s too late to raise the soul,
some ossified conceit we use to talk about deer
as if we were deer, to talk about the sun, as if the cold
autumn light mirrored our lover asleep in the tub.

Nevertheless, I want to talk about it. Those scarred bodies
on the hospital table, they’re white chalk children use
to deface the sidewalk. The deer fed in the gazebo,
where the salt lick was barely safe from the fox.

And when the wind didn’t drag my scent to her,
I sat listless, half-awake, and watched her hunger
surpass her timidity. I should have been changed.
I should have been startled into submission

by a very white light, I should have shed my misgivings
as her tongue made that sticky sound on the lick
and two startled animals stared into what St. Francis
called a mystery. I should bring her back, the woman too,

the woman who what why words fail me here.
I should sanctify the hospital gown as it slides down
the tunnel of the catscan, to see where
the nodules have spread into the thin, pliable tissues

we call the innards in animals, because they dwell
in scenery, they’re setting for the poem, they provide
a respite from the subject who’s been probed and lacerated,
who’s been skinned and eaten away by the story

when I’m beguiled by the music the hooves made
on the pine floor. I can bring her back, can’t I,
I’m bringing him back, the hero who was close enough
so I could watch what was inside his face hover and scatter.

My Mother’s Funeral

The rabbi doesn't say she was sly and peevish,
fragile and voracious, disheveled, voiceless and useless,
at the end of her very long rope. He never sat beside her
like a statue while radio voices called to her from God.
He doesn't say how she mamboed with her broom,
staggered, swayed, and sighed afternoons,
till we came from school to feed her. She never frightened him,
or bent to kiss him, sponged him with a fever, never held his hand,
bone-white, bolted doors and shut the blinds. She never sent
roaches in a letter, he never saw her fall down stairs, dead sober.
He never watched her sweep and murmur, he never saw
spider webs she read as signs her life was over, long before
her frightened husband left, long before
they dropped her in a box, before her children turned
shyly from each other, since they never learned to pray.
If I must think of her, if I can spare her moment on the earth,
I'll say she was one of God's small sculptures,
polished to a glaze, one the wind blew off a shelf.

TRANSGRESSIONS

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