CODA FOR JOB

I might as easily have been his second wife as his first.
I might have sprung up beside the wheat in his vast, untended fields,
One day black and seeded with salt, the next an Eden
Shot to heaven with green in time for harvest.
Sometimes I want to ask him, can't you taste the bones
Of your children in the flour that made this bread?
But I know he'd be only too happy to find his mouth full of dust.
I've caught him bathing alone at the river, seen him
Fingering his many faint scars with reverence, as if
His body were a tablet spelling out a new law. And maybe it is.
It is a strange life, this coda to his strange song.
I walk at sunrise to the well with my daughters and
The village wives scatter, but leave behind tiny packets of spice
So I won't know they're afraid.
And he never talks about our other first born son,
Though this child wears the same clothes, with the same
Simple prayers woven into the hem.
Job comes at evening from his vineyards, pockets stuffed
With grapes too sweet for such an early vintage.
We taste them in the darkness. He wonders if I am happy.
I say: I wish for nothing.

-- Karynn Fish

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CHASING THE ACORN MOON

The month between inevitability and boredom,
That florid apocalypse of marvelous decay,
Of madness on the verge of genius.
Incredulous mystics, loosed to haunt
The corridors of sullen, respectable neighborhoods,
We gather together the signs we have taken for wonders
And find our own souls marked for twilight.
We will spend the whole night in fitful contemplation
Of our myriad potential significances,
Each there for the reasoning,
Obedient to both the laws of physics
And the more grave implications of dreams,
All at once inspired and deformed by desire.
Three times I wake on the quarter hour,
Caught in a celestial highbeam,
Chasing the acorn moon down the windows.
If we are dying, I want to tell you,
As though a more delicate syntax
Could make what is certain less so,
If we are dying, we must erase ourselves
As ruthlessly as the autumn starlight
Cuts each night its own black throat,
As slyly as the season's chill creeps round
To settle in airless corners of the house.
My love. If we are dying
We must not erase ourselves
Gorgeous as these leaves everywhere
Bleeding fire onto the fine wet streets.

-- Karynn Fish