Gagging on an apple
Each departing soul
A hopeful tent of oxygen
A bale of farther food
Moving like sea in a jar
If I could melt the maze of tongues
Shoveling out the Bibles
And the yellow daisies
Before the knees buckle
Waving away the transfer tube
I might be known as a purifier
Caulking up the Antichrist
Before the rain storms of April
But my spine runs on bourbon
And spite and green ice
Back and forth like an angry bird
Trembling I mark the spot
Where the air rudder goes
Until she gasps and circles back
A fermata in a wheelchair
Army wraparound shades propped up
Blind as my grandmother
On a snowy evening
Behind the leather padded
Doors of the US capital
Super intriguing! Great job!
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Thanks Megan!
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Another fine poem. What I make of it isn’t what it is, doesn’t change what it is, but there is a sense in which a poem is incomplete until it has been read and responded to. I read this as a poem about death and denial, with the dying unable to swallow the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, and their experience is unknowably rich like a sea in a jar, offering us a bale of further (future, beyond death) food we cannot see. The poet pushes away the babel of beliefs and caulks up the boat of the Antichrist, against the spring storms of hope and rebirth. The poet is an angry bird, watching the death of the national bird, the bird of our nation, a fermata in a wheelchair,
holed up behind the padded doors of the national capitol.
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Yup, yup and yup. All there. Not as truth or intention so much as a silvered mirror for the reader, just as you approached it.
Thanks for the close read, bro.
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