Two Poems 0 comments

by Jill Peláez Baumgaertner

Prodigal Ghazal

Weightless as a float into the drift of water, one whose sin is forgiven.
The Far Country a memory of fists and sour apples.

Of that old, heavy plunge through snowfall, frozen, refrozen.
The tug of gravity, slow and silent.

Of no words forming on dry lips, of breath aching to a full inhale and then a
     letting go.
Of not yet. Not yet. And the longing for release.

The hold of grimy pleasures like a small mouth forming very small o’s,
Like spaces as vast as the tundra with no human voice or as tight as a wound spool.

The wasting disease of sin, God’s serious hand of judgment.
Then his gentle push: the swing into the spring air, back and forth.

And then the breathing, unboxed. And later the fingers spread
wide in the grass, each particular blade a tickle.

The Father runs into the road, his embrace a chunk of earth to the unmoored.
The twisted eyebeams, the Father’s gaze into his son’s tentative face.

Pupils black with light peering into the lens of revelation, crystalline.
Now comes the filling in of hunger, the bread hunks spilling crumbs.

The wine meant for throats dry with salt and dust.
Here is God, his strokes on our dead flesh

Filling capillaries, sparking nerves. We are fed with the crusts
And blood of forgiveness, with the thrill of its gentle float, its ripe music.

For a Birthday and Wedding Anniversary, Two Days Apart

Mornings their garden greens and flowers,
tomatoes ripen fat as babies’ bellies,
hollyhocks tower straight-laced as fence rails.

This is not the black-topped yard of her childhood,
weedless, grassless, without tree bark or squirrel.

Here she follows behind her husband’s wild planting.
Where Adam has sown, she is Eve weeding,
creating order and the simplicity of black earth,

clean around each plant’s tuft or blossom,
important and particular. Like the tidy numbers
that track her checkbook or the organ she plays

with such precision, she sorts and arranges,
meticulous as her print on a fluted pie crust.

Tumbling back upon itself, this story with setting,
plot, and rising action begins with a scatter of water
on new flesh, pauses at the wedding altar for lovely entanglement,

leads always to the children, bright flesh prints,
and resolves around the moving point of a slender man,
her mate. Tomorrow they will rise

from their ordinary pew, front right, pulpit-side,
step carefully to the aisle, cup their hands for bread,
tip the chalice for wine, and join the narrative line

that stretches back before they were and reaches
forward, demanding blessing.