——–Homing: the innate ability of an animal to navigate toward 

——–an original location through unfamiliar areas

At Watermelon Creek, Georgia, ancestral burying ground
where the road sign proclaims
God formed us—Sin
deformed us—
Christ transforms us—

cricket-shrill in the still pines—

The marble tombstone
of my thrice-great grandfather Daniel,
his finger carved to point us heavenward
had smash-collapsed and instead
that two-centuries-old fallen finger directed
my eyes straight through the groundscrub
to the flat slab grave of a
Bruce H. Beasley

and my nerves shrilled to the shrill.

———————*

I tried, Onslow County Thomas-trinity,
on Google Maps to get to street view
of the Schoolhouse Branch by the Cypress Run
where George the Second said Be it known
we have given use
to Thomas Beseley and his heirs
but it was nothing but sandpatch creekswamp and scrub pine

near High Voltage Hobby Shop
and Spoiled to the Bone Kennel and
as they say in ancient transcriptions Here
follow unintelligible
marks and signs

———————*

In Morton’s Grove outside Chicago,
a church hoards relics of a thousand saints,
with a “paper relic, Bishop-certified”
of the body of Blessed George Beesley:
Its sacred seal, the priest says on the phone, can never be broken,
so who knows what it might contain,
a knucklebone, a finger-stub,
can I hold it when the pandemic has died,
can I rattle it, finger
it, will it
in all its
antecedentlessness

point me some-
when with
an undilutable pheromone-
trail
toward the unknown
preknown home

 

 

---

Bruce Beasley is the author of nine collections of poems, most recently Prayershreds (Orison) and Theophobia (BOA). He has won four Pushcart Prizes and an NEA fellowship, and his poems have recently appeared in New American Writing, Lana Turner, Agni, and elsewhere.

 

 

 

Photo by Kerin Gedge on Unsplash